Daily Archives: April 17, 2022

Well, the Big Lie, Russian style, has begun. It's not exactly like losing an election that's never going to happen in Vladimir Putin's Russia but losing a guided missile cruiser, the Moskva, the most important warship in Russia's Black Sea fleet is, let us say, just a little hard for the big guy to stomach back at the Kremlin, or the dacha, or whatever bunker he's keeping himself in these days.

But not to worry! Russki spinners were on it before the big ship even hit the bottom! Uh hmm I've got it! A fire broke out on board! It spread to the ammunition stores! There was an explosion! That's the ticket!

Anything but the obvious: it was sunk by two Neptune anti-ship missiles fired from Ukrainian soil. So what does Putin do? Why, he has one of his factotums deliver a diplomatic protest known as a dmarche from the Russian embassy in Washington to the Department of State threatening "unpredictable consequences" unless the U.S. stops shipping advanced weapons to Ukraine.

RELATED:Putin's big fail: He's a spook, not a military commander and not even a good spook

The Russian threat came on the heels of a warning by CIA Director William J. Burns that Putin might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons to counter his losses on the battlefield and now the high seas. "Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they've faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons," Burns said in answer to a question from former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, who was one of the architects of the agreement that removed nuclear weapons from Ukraine and other former Soviet client states 30 years ago. (You remember that jewel: Russia would take the nukes from Ukraine and the rest of the vassal states in return for providing their security.) Burns is a former ambassador to Russia who dealt directly with Putin while serving in Moscow and is the Biden administration official most familiar with his thinking.

Meanwhile, following Finland and Sweden's announcements that they will petition to join NATO "within weeks, not months," Moscow confirmed Burns' suspicions by once again rattling its nuclear saber. Dmitry Medvedev, former president and deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, posted this on his official Telegram channel on Thursday: "If Sweden and Finland join NATO, the length of the alliance's land borders with the Russian Federation will more than double. Naturally, these borders will have to be strengthened. Russia will seriously strengthen the grouping of land forces and air defense, deploy significant naval forces in the waters of the Gulf of Finland.In this case, it will no longer be possible to talk about any nuclear-free status of the Baltic."

Putin has taken one body blow after another since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine almost two months ago. First, it was the humiliation of the 40-mile military convoy from Belarus to Kyiv that was supposed to take the Ukrainian capital city and decapitate its leadership, sending Volodymyr Zelenskyy into panicked flight. Didn't happen. Instead, Putin's convoy was repeatedly attacked by Ukrainian ground forces, stalling its progress outside of Kyiv. Many tanks, mobile artillery pieces and armored personnel carriers simply ran out of gas and turned into easy targets for Ukrainian soldiers armed with shoulder-fired rockets such as the Javelin and RPG-7 rocket fired grenades.

Russian soldiers, apparently frustrated by their inability to penetrate Ukrainian defenses around Kyiv, and possibly under the orders of superiors they may have feared would shoot them in the back of their heads, struck out at civilians in the suburb of Bucha and other towns along the capital's western border, shooting at least 95 percent of them in, you guessed it, the back of the head. "People were simply executed in the streets," Andriy Nebytov, the head of Kyiv's regional police force, told reporters as he supervised the investigation of the murders committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha. More than 900 bodies of Ukrainian civilians had been recovered as of Friday, according to reports.

Attacks by the Ukrainian military, operating with small units in well-coordinated maneuvers, drove Russian forces into open retreat across the border in recent weeks, another humiliation for the Russian president, who by many accounts expected his war on Ukraine to be over within a week. The Times of London reported on Monday that Putin had fired as many as 150 officers in the Federal Security Bureau (FSB) Fifth Service, a department of the Russian intelligence service set up to operate within countries of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine. The purge included jailing Sergei Beseda, the former head of the Fifth Service,in Lefortovo prison in Moscow, a facility long used by the KGB to interrogate and punish political prisoners in Soviet times. Putin appears to be scapegoating the FSB for the intelligence failures that have led to the disaster in Ukraine as the war heads into its third month with no real military gains he can point to as victories.

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At a background briefing on Thursday, a senior Pentagon official told reporters that Russia is continuing its buildup of forces in eastern Ukraine. "We continue to see Russia posture for offensive operations in the Donbas, and continue to see additional equipment arrive in western Russia and in that area to the north of the Donbas that we talked about, Valuyki and Rovenki, including, in fact, we've seen some additional helicopters make their way to be staged in that area for insertion."

Translation: The Pentagon has eyes-in-the-sky watching every move the Russians make in and around Ukraine, including the areas of Russia and Belarus it has previously used as staging grounds for attack. When the Pentagon says stuff like, "additional helicopters," that means they're counting every one of them, which means they're counting artillery pieces, tanks, refueling trucks the whole lot and passing that information directly to Ukraine.

Has Putin learned any lessons over the last 50-plus days? His offensive in eastern Ukraine looks to be a carbon copy of the one that failed to take Kyiv and Kharkiv in March.

Which makes you wonder why Putin hasn't learned any lessons over the last 50-plus days. He appears to be readying a new offensive in eastern Ukraine that will be a carbon copy of the one he launched against Kyiv and Kharkiv in February and March. The Pentagon is being very open about what it is "seeing" on the ground in both Russian staging areas and in Ukraine itself, as it was before the invasion on Feb. 24. If the Pentagon was correct the last time about both Russian intentions and movements and it was the chances are very strong it's correct this time as well. It would be safe to assume that the Ukrainian response to the new Russian offensive in the east will be at least as effective as it was before, given the new weapons systems that even now are making their way to Ukraine's army. These include attack helicopters, long-range artillery and ground-to-ground rocket launchers, and the MIG-29s from Poland that are finally going to join Ukraine's air arsenal.

The last time the Pentagon shared its intelligence about Russia with the world, Putin wasn't listening. That means there is a strong chance his less-than-competent army will lose on the battlefield again. If that happens, who knows what the "unpredictable consequences" will be? Like another authoritarian leader I can think of, Vladimir Putin is going to learn that the Big Lie is a poor substitute for winning.

Read more on Putin, Russia and the war in Ukraine:

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Putin can't take much more of this: What lies ahead, defeat or apocalypse? - Salon

After a series of embarrassing setbacks in trying to capture Ukraines capital, Kyiv, over the past 40-odd days, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ultimately decided to have his forces retreat, and regroup to go after eastern Ukraine. But his cronies cant seem to get the picture straight.

Putin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republicalso known as Putins foot soldiersaid on his Telegram account this week that Russia will still be working to take Kyiv.

We will take Kyiv and all other cities, Kadyrov said.

The picture on the ground is far different, though. With Russian forces failing to take Kyiv, they left and abandoned that goal, instead focusing on the east. As recently as Tuesday this week, a senior U.S. defense official confirmed in a briefing that Russia is still focusing on the eastern portions of Ukraine.

In all fairness, Russia is working to take eastern portions of Ukraine, which Kadyrov mentioned as well. But for the moment, his messaging seems way off from Putins current planning process.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov enters the hall during the meeting of State Council at the Grand Kremlin Palace, in Moscow, Russia, June 26,2019.

Mikhail Svetlov/Getty

But this isnt a function of a war dragging on and messaging getting lost in the fog. The list of mishaps and communications not going according to plan goes back months. In mid-March, Kadyrov claimed he and Chechen forces were near Kyiva claim Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov flat-out denied. And during a now notorious meeting with Russias Presidential Security Council in February, Putin lashed out at the chief of Russias Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, when Naryshkin spoke about Russias policy towards eastern Ukraine in a way that apparently irked Putin. Naryshkin hesitated and stammered his way through his words, molding them to Putins will as they wentand as Putin continually interrupted him.

The trouble might be self-inflicted, at least in part. Putin has isolated himself from his advisers while waging a war that is, unlike any war in Europe before, being documented in real time on social media. All eyes are on Putin and his cronies every move. And for Putins Russia, which isnt built for transparency or message coordination and rollout, the fumbles are glaringly obvious.

The way he's been engaged in this war, the way he is participating is kind of like he's acting on its own.

The Russians dont practice this. Its not an open society, they dont talk to the pressthey dont even attempt to be transparent. Undoubtedly because its such a stovepiped system and they dont have much experience or use in talking to the press its inevitable theyd be working at cross-purposes, Douglas London, a former CIA chief of station, told The Daily Beast. Putin is very much a stovepiped decision-maker in terms of how he delegates power and authority.

Vladimir Putin speaks during a concert marking the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, on March 18, 2022 in Moscow, Russia.

Getty

Examining what Putin wants to do next in the war is like a game of Russian rouletteand many, even in Putins inner circle, are just throwing out ideas they think might stick, or that might align with what Putin wants, even if they have no clue what hes thinking, according to Anton Barbashin, a Russian political analyst.

Among the many decision-makers or elites in Russia only a few have a clear-cut understanding of what is actually happening [including] whats the strategy and how it evolves. We never know who exactly knows the situation, Barbashin told The Daily Beast. Theres just a lot of people speculating on how they understand the situation.

Some of the fudged messages coming from advisers are tied to their interest in vying for attention from Putin and trying to show him just how loyal and useful they can be in the war.

Its essentially a competition to prove to the Kremlin, Look, this version is better for Russia and I'm ready to execute it. I'm ready to be that institution that you can rely on to solve your problems, Barbashin said. Theyre showing specifically their loyalty to the Kremlin, to Putin, to the cause. And theyre trying to compete.

An increasingly isolated and rage-filled Putin has found himself surrounded by advisers too scared to tell him things were not going well on the battlefield, though, leading him to have an inaccurate picture of the war, which may also contribute to bad messaging, according to top Biden administration officials.

We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told reporters in a briefing last month.

Putin has cordoned himself off so much in recent months that its not clear anyone knows what Moscows next move will be.

Generally speaking it is very hard to understand even for them, what is the decision because the Kremlin doesn't know yet, Barbashin said. That has been a Kremlin thing for decades now to work several options at the same time [and] depending on the circumstances choosing one.

The messages from Kadyrov need to be taken with a sizable grain of salt because he is essentially operating as a kind of vassal ally to Russiaone with his own personal goals and interest in maintaining a foothold in Russian power circles.

Hes a very special kind of duck in this mix, Barbashin said. The way he's been engaged in this war, the way he is participating, is kind of like he's acting on its own.

Vladimir Putin visits the Vostochny cosmodrome, some 180 km north of Blagoveschensk, Amur region, on April 12, 2022.

MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/Sputnik/AFP via Getty

Putins war has encountered a whole slew of other problems that have tripped Putin and his cronies up. Putins forces, for one, struggled to take Kyiv, a situation that frustrated Putin, according to a CIA analysis shared with U.S. lawmakers. A senior defense official said in briefings last month that a column of Russian forces was stalling outside of Kyiv due to failures of resourcing and a lack of fuel. Russian command and control has been a mess. And officials have been scratching their heads at why Russia launched a series of cyberattacks on Ukrainian banks and websites in advance of the invasionbut have largely failed to run a flurry of successful hacks while waging war in Ukraine, a move which some analysts say could have made their invasion more chaotic for Ukrainians, and lent an advantage to Russia.

U.S. intelligence officials eventually realized it wasnt clear if Putin had a top military commander in charge of running the war in Ukraine, according to CNN. Units running different operations around Ukraine werent communicating with each other, making for a poor distribution of resources and lack of coordination, officials said.

Theyre not organized to function in this overall very organized chain of command.

Putin appears to know that he might need more coordination if he is going to walk away with any positive news to bring back to Russia. As Russia has retreated from Kyiv and works to regroup and refocus on the eastern portions of Ukraine, Russia is tapping Aleksandr Dvornikov, the chief of staff of Russias Central Military District, to be the top commander in Ukraine. And a military convoy north of Izyum might be poised to provide more logistics support to the offensive in eastern Ukraine, as a way to make up for lack of preparation earlier, a senior U.S. defense official said in a briefing Tuesday.

But this little bit of optics playannouncing a new leaderisnt likely to overhaul the disorganized way the war is going for Russia, in particular because the military is just not equipped for an overarching command structure right now, London said.

I dont think its going to make for an immediate solution to a lot of the problems theyre having, particularly in terms of logistics, command control, and morale, London told The Daily Beast. They may now have said theyve got this overall battlefield commander I dont necessarily know its going to quite roll out that way because theyre not organized to work that way. Theyre not organized to function in this overall very organized chain of command.

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Lonely Putin Is Losing Control of His Own Spiraling Minions - The Daily Beast

Bill Browder, a millionaire hedge-fund manager based in London, realized something was wrong the moment a stunning blond woman with full red lips and a skimpy black cocktail dress approached him.

It was July 2012, and Browder was at a reception at the Hotel Le Mridien in Monaco, as part of a human-rights conference with representatives from over 57 countries. The woman, who introduced herself as Svetlana Melnikova, flirted unabashedly with Browder.

I normally work in fashion, she said, touching his arm. But I find politics to be so fascinating.

Browder wasnt buying any of it. Im a five-foot-nine middle-aged bald man. Six-foot, busty blond models dont throw themselves at me. This couldnt have been a more blatant honey trap, he writes in his new book, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putins Wrath (Simon & Schuster), out now.

He had good reason to be suspicious. Hed come to the conference to argue for the Magnitsky Act, a proposed bill that would sanction Russian officials suspected of human-rights abuses. Later that year, the act would be signed into law in the United States, and Browder was on a mission to convince the European Union to follow their lead.

Russian President Vladimir Putin considered the Magnitsky Act an existential threat to his regime, and he would stop at nothing to bring the man responsible to justice or at least his idea of justice.

Later that night, Svetlana e-mailed Browder, asking to meet him for a drink.

I cant stop thinking about you, she wrote. Id really like to see you this evening.

Browder, who was staying in a hotel across the border in the south of France, knew what she was really after.

Id heard stories about Putins enemies checking into Monaco hotels, presenting their passports, and finding themselves arrested within minutes by the local police, he writes. Sharing his location with Svetlana, he knew, could have put him in mortal danger.

On the run from Russian officials since 2005, Browder left the country after being accused of everything from tax fraud to money laundering. He was one of the most sought-after fugitives on Russias domestic wanted list, and it was all because of his campaigning for the Magnitsky Act named for Browders lawyer, the Ukrainian-born Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered in a Russian jail in November 2009.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Chicago, Browder moved to London after getting his MBA from Stanford Business School in 1989. He worked for consulting firms like Boston Consulting Group, married a Brit, and renounced his US citizenship (mostly as a protest over how his communist grandparents had been treated during the McCarthy era).

His success with Russian investments at Salomon Brothers in London inspired him to relocate to Moscow and launch the hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management in 1996, which became one of the largest foreign investors in post-Soviet Russia. Although they had about $4.5 billion invested in Russian equities, he was frustrated that many of his investments were being robbed blind by Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials, he writes.

So he fought back, exposing the corruption to the international media. To make money, I didnt have to put a complete stop to the stealing, Browder writes. I just needed to create enough pressure for marginal change.

It didnt, however, make him very popular in Russia. And by November 2005, on trumped-up charges of tax fraud and money-laundering basically accusing him of what hed accused the oligarchs the Kremlin declared him a threat to national security and barred him from ever returning to Russia.

Browder hired Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate, and in the summer of 2008, Magnitsky uncovered a massive conspiracy involving the theft of $230 million using tax-refund fraud from three of Hermitages companies. Browder hoped that by exposing the fraud, it would quietly go away as it had in the past. Instead, hed poked a sleeping bear.

Magnitsky was arrested, accused of committing the same fraud he had just exposed, and held for 358 days where, according to Browder, he was regularly tortured and deprived of medical treatment. On his final day, he was chained to a bed, and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergei until he was dead, Browder writes. He was only 37 years old. (The Interior Ministry listed Magnitskys cause of death as heart failure.)

Hed been killed because hed worked for me, Browder writes. The guilt I felt and continue to feel permeates every cell of my body. To avenge his deceased friend and colleague, he started campaigning for lawmakers to create legislation hed dubbed the Magnitsky Act, which punished not just the oligarchs responsible for the stolen millions uncovered by Magnitsky but also freezes the US assets of all Russian human-rights violators.

The Magnitsky Act put all of Putins wealth and power at risk, writes Browder, who claims that the Russian president isnt just aware of the corruption but directly profits from it. That made him a very angry man. His crusade against the Magnitsky Act wasnt just philosophical, it was personal. We had genuinely hit Vladimir Putins Achilles heel.

As Browder traveled the world, championing countries to enact their own versions of the Magnitsky bill, his allies and whistleblowers were being assassinated.

Alexander Perepilichnyy, a Russian financial advisor who played an important role in our money-laundering investigation, Browder says, collapsed while jogging near his Surrey home in November 2012. He was found with green foam bubbling from his lips and died shortly thereafter.

Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin who became my partner in fighting for the Magnitsky Act all over the world, Browder writes, was shot in the back in February 2015, just feet from the Kremlin.

When Browder released his first book about taking on Putin, the 2015 bestseller Red Notice, and went on tour to promote it, he felt a bigger target on his back than ever. While he was in London, his wife and four kids were visited at their Aspen summer home by two men, who confronted his children outside with questions like, Is your daddy home? Even after they retreated to the basement, the men stood outside and rang the bell for more than an hour.

I dont feel safe here anymore, Browders wife told him.

When the dust settled, we learned that the people chasing me had not been kidnappers or poisoners, but process servers hired by the Russians, writes Browder.

It was part of a court case involving the Russian company Prevezon, accused by the US Attorneys Office in New York of tax fraud involving millions in Manhattan real estate all part of the original stolen $230 million first identified by the late Magnitsky. Their defense lawyers were determined to make Browder central to the case, pinning him as the real mastermind behind the fraud.

Browder finally showed up for his deposition, and after nine hours of questioning, in which he mostly replied that he didnt know or didnt remember, he was released. By 2018, Prevezon settled out of court, paying a $5.9 million settlement.

That same year, however, Browder was finally placed in handcuffs. Not by Russian agents, but by uniformed police officers in Madrid, working for Russia, who surprised him at his hotel room.

Before they took him away, Browder tweeted a distress signal to his 135,000 followers, many of them journalists, government officials, and politicians from around the world: Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant, he tweeted.

His captors took him to an unmarked building for a medical exam, but Browder refused to leave the car. They eventually escorted him to the police station, but he didnt stay for long.

My tweets had generated hundreds of phone calls to Interpol and the Spanish authorities, Browder writes, who soon realized the mess theyd waltzed into.

Interpol ruled that the Russian warrant wasnt valid because it was politically motivated, and Browder was released.

He came close to being captured again that summer, during a Helsinki summit between Putin and then-President Donald Trump, when Putin suggested during a press conference that hed allow Russian officials indicted for hacking into Democratic Party servers to be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller, but only if the Americans would reciprocate. For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case.

Browder waited for Trumps reaction. I think thats an incredible offer, Trump said, suggesting he was ready to trade me.

It was personal. We had genuinely hit Vladimir Putins Achilles Hell.

So Browder went on the defensive, giving interviews to CNN, Fox News and the BBC, explaining that if he was extradited to Russia, he would be thrown in a Russian prison, where I would be tortured and eventually killed. Just a few weeks later, a state department spokesperson called Putins proposal absolutely absurd.

Browder, now 57 and still running his Hermitage hedge fund in London, says hes sleeping peacefully these days. As of this writing, there are Magnitsky Acts in 34 countries: the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, the 27 countries of the European Union, Norway, Montenegro, and Kosovo.

Magnitsky sanctions have been used outside of Russia, punishing everyone from the Saudi assassins who murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi to the Chinese officials who set up the Uighur concentration camps in Xinjiang.

But theres a long way to go, says Browder, who still faces 18 years in a Russian prison camp if he ever returns to Moscow. The $230 million discovered by Magnitsky is just a fraction of Putins fortune, which is estimated at $200 billion. It hasnt yet been used against Putin during the invasion of Ukraine, but in March, Human Rights First and almost 60 other civil society groups called on Congress to strengthen the Magnitsky Act so it could be used to punish recent atrocities.

Still, Putin hasnt given up on demonizing Browder. When the European Union passed the European Magnitsky Act in late 2020, the Russian General Prosecutors Office held a press conference in Moscow, in which they accused Browder of forming a transnational criminal group that murdered Magnitsky using a diversionary chemical substance containing aluminum compounds.

After almost a decade of insisting that Magnitsky had died of natural causes, the Russian government was claiming that Sergei had in fact been murdered, Browder writes, and that I was his murderer.

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US hedge funders new book reveals terrifying life on the run from Putin - New York Post

As we watch the murderous carnage that Putin has unleashed against innocent Ukrainians, we are all trying to understand Putins motivations. Some say hes reacting to NATO expansion, others contend that Putin cant abide a Western-leaning Ukraine. Still others offer that Putin so laments the break-up of the Soviet Union that he wants to reassemble it.

From my perspective, its not due to any of these reasons. Its simply about money. Unlike most other governments, Russias is not there to serve the people, but to enrich senior officials through endemic corruption. The more senior you are, the richer you get. And the most senior person, Vladimir Putin, has become the richest. I estimate his wealth to be well north of $200 billion.

Ive seen how Russian corruption works with my own eyes. For a decade, between 1996 and 2005, I ran the largest foreign investment firm in Russia. My business model was simple: buy deeply undervalued shares in Russian companies, expose these companies corruption, and then watch their share prices rise as the companies were forced to clean up. It worked like a charm. However, as you can imagine, the oligarchs and corrupt officials who were doing the stealing werent too happy with me. In November 2005, I was kicked out of the country and declared a threat to Russian national security.

I moved to London and regrouped with my small team. We also went about liquidating the funds Russian assets. In 2006, our holding companies reported a profit of $1 billion, paying $230 million in taxes to the Russian Treasury. I was done with Russia.

But Russia was not done with me.

In 2007, my office in Moscow was raided by the Russian Interior Ministry. All of our documents were seized, and these were used to perpetrate a highly complex tax rebate fraud scheme to steal $230 million from the Russian Treasury that our investment holding companies had previously paid.

My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered the crime, testified against the officials involved, and in retaliation was arrested. He was held for 358 days, tortured, and killed on November 16, 2009 in Russian police custody. He was only 37 years old. He left behind a wife, a seven-year-old son, and a loving mother.

The grave of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery in Moscow on Dec. 7, 2012.

Andrey SmirnovAFP/Getty Images

Since then, it has been my lifes mission to get justice for Sergei. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get justice in Russia. The Russian government promoted the people who had killed Sergei, giving them state honors. Three years after Sergeis murder, the Russian government put him on trial in the first-ever case against a dead man in Russian history.

This story is a microcosm of what happens every day in Russia. You need to multiply the crime that Sergei discovered by 1,000 to begin to appreciate how much has been stolen by Putin and his cronies.

The problem for Putin is that this level of corruption is unsustainable. Russia presents itself as a democracy to its people. And those people are the ones deprived of health care, education, paved roads, and a decent standard of living so that senior officials in the Putin regime can enjoy yachts, private jets, and villas in the South of France. No matter what Russian propagandists peddle, eventually people will get angry. Putin looked around and what he saw frightened him. In Kazakhstan, another corrupt dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was ousted earlier this year in January. In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko was almost ousted following the fraudulent 2019 election. It was only because of Putins intervention that Lukashenko is still in power.

So Putin dug into the dictators playbook and started a war. Now, instead of the Russian people being mad at him, they can be mad at Nazified Ukrainians, or the U.S., or NATO.

So far, he seems to be succeeding with his approval ratings in Russia around 83 percent.

It is now plain that Putin is evil. This is not breathless hyperbole. It is fact. He has no regard for human life, and only lusts over power and money. In his calculus, money is power, and vice versa.

Amazingly, Putin himself has now been sanctioned by the West. But finding the whereabouts of his money is no easy task. Ive spent the last 14 years trying to understand the dark money flowing out of Russia. Once we found it, there was a huge price to pay.

On April 3, 2016, the British newspaper the Guardian, published an article titled, Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin. The author was part of a consortium of 370 journalists from 80 countries reporting on a data leak known as The Panama Papers.

Central to the leak were over 11 million documents held by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The files revealed financial details of hundreds of thousands of offshore companies and accounts belonging to wealthy people from around the world.

The articles were divided by country, and each country had a star. In Russia, that star was classical cellist named Sergei Roldugin.

Roldugin wasnt just a cellist, but also Putins best friend going back to the 1970s. Even though Roldugin professed to drive a used car and play a secondhand cello, he controlled companies that had accumulated billions of dollars of assets since Putin took power, effectively making him the richest musician in the world.

A quick Google search reveals that the richest musicians are Jay-Z, Sir Paul McCartney, and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, who are each worth around $1.25 billion. Yo-Yo Ma is probably the worlds wealthiest cellist, and hes worth only about $25 million.

How had Roldugin become so wealthy? The answer, in my opinion, is that this cellist was serving as a nominee for his longtime friend, Vladimir Putin.

Read More: Ukraine Is Our Past and Our Future

As anyone who follows Russia knows, Putin loves money. But because hes president, he can only earn his official salary (which is around $300,000 a year), and he cant hold any assets beyond those he accumulated before he was in government. If he did, anyone who got hold of a copy of a bank statement or a property registry with his name on it could use it as leverage to blackmail him. Putin is well aware of this, because hes used this tactic on many occasions against his own enemies.

Therefore, Putin needed others to hold his money so that no paper trail led back to him. For this, he needed people he could trust. In any mafia-like organization, these people are rare birds. There is no commodity more valuable than trust.

Roldugin was one such person for Putin. From the moment the two had met on the streets of Leningrad in their 20s, they were like brothers. Roldugin introduced Putin to his wife; he was the godfather to Putins firstborn daughter; and through the decades they had remained the closest of friends.

For us, this news was potentially even more dramatic. If we could somehow link any of the $230 million tax refund that Sergei Magnitsky had been killed over to Putin through Roldugin, it would be a game-changer.

Two days later, an obscure Lithuanian website reported that one of the companies linked to Roldugin had received $800,000 from an account at a Lithuanian bank. This account belonged to a shell company called Delco Networks.

We searched our money laundering database and found that this $800,000 was connected to the $230 million tax refund. After leaving Russia, the money had passed through a series of banks in Moldova, Estonia, and, ultimately, Lithuania.

We could now link the crime that Sergei Magnitsky had exposed and been killed over to Roldugin. And from Roldugin, we could link it to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

This explained everything.

When Sergei was killed, Putin could have had the perpetrators of the tax rebate fraud prosecuted, but he didnt. When the international community demanded justice for Sergei, Putin exonerated everyone involved. When the Magnitsky Act passed in in the United States, freezing all assets of those implicated in Sergeis murder, Putin retaliated by banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. Before the law passed, Putins government had even arranged for Dmitry Klyuev, a convicted mobster, along with his consigliere, Andrei Pavlov, both private citizens, to attend the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Monaco to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, as if they were some sort of special government envoys.

Why had Putin gone to such lengths to protect a group of crooked officials and organized criminals?

Because, quite simply, he was protecting himself.

Out of $230 million, $800,000 is a pittance. But sums like these add up. Its like charging $5 for a toll. For one car, its nothing, but after a million cars, youve collected a fortune.

Mossack Fonseca was merely one of hundreds of offshore trust companies. If these other companies books were similarly exposed, I was sure we would find other trustees of Vladimir Putin who had received other tranches of the $230 million. And this was just one crime among thousands and thousands of crimes that had taken place in Russia since Putin took power.

We were looking at the tip of an enormous iceberg.

The Magnitsky Act says that Russian human rights violators will have their assets frozen in the West. It also says that beneficiaries of the $230 million crime will be sanctioned. That Putin was a human rights violator was not in dispute, but now he ticked both boxes.

The Magnitsky Act put all of his wealth and power at risk. That made him a very angry man. His crusade against the Magnitsky Act wasnt just philosophical, it was personal.

We had genuinely hit Vladimir Putins Achilles heel.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands before attending a joint press conference in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018.

Yuri KadobnovAFP/Getty Images

At 8:00 a.m. on Monday, July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin were in the midst of their summit in Helsinki, Finland. I was in Aspen with my family. I set up my laptop at the end of the dining room table, a view of the mountains to the west over my shoulder.

I needed to get some work done, and I didnt want any distractions. My kids usually run riot all over the house, but that day I put the dining room off-limits. I also put restraints on myself, laying down my phone. After two hours of work, I turned over my phone. The screen was flush with notifications. I had dozens of messagestexts, emails, DMs, voicemails, everything.

I opened the first email. Bill, are you watching Helsinki??

I scrolled through my inbox. That was the scariest, most fucked-up thing I have ever seen, one friend said. Another wrote, If you need a place to hide, we will put you in our mountain house!

What the hell was going on? I found the earliest email about Helsinki, from the correspondent Ali Velshi at MSNBC. The subject was to the point: Putin talking about you now.

Fuck.

I put down my phone and went online. It didnt take long to find the post-summit press conference. The two leaders were onstage at twin lecterns, and their body language couldnt have been more different. Putin looked like he owned the place, while Trump glowered and slumped his shoulders, looking anything but presidential.

The shocking moment came when a Reuters reporter asked: President Putin, will you consider extraditing the twelve Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury? Robert Mueller, the special counsel who had been in charge of investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, as well as possible Russian links to the Trump campaign, had made an unexpected announcement the week before. His office was indicting 12 Russian GRU officers (the GRU is Russias military intelligence wing), accusing them of hacking the Democratic National Committee and interfering in the election to help Trump win.

Putin smiled and nodded confidently, looking like hed spent the whole weekend preparing for this moment. We can meet you halfway We can actually permit representatives of the United States, including this very commission headed by Mr. Mueller. We can let them into the country. They can be present at questioning. In this case theres another condition. This kind of effort should be a mutual one. We would expect that the Americans would reciprocate For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case.

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I had to watch it several times to make sure that Id heard it correctly. Somehow, Putin, standing next to the President of the United States, was suggesting swapping 12 Russian GRU officersfor me!

I waited for Trumps reaction. Surely, he would reject this out of hand.

But he didnt. I think thats an incredible offer, he said, suggesting he was ready to trade me.

Rationally, I understood the gravity of the situation, but emotionally I was too shaken to take it in. It was like being in a serious car accident. I knew Id just been injured, but I had no idea how badly.

As I tried to assess the damage, the main thing I kept coming back to was whether it was safe for me to stay in America. My original, nebulous concern that some Russian assassin might try to kill me had now been overtaken by the very real fear that the President of the United States would hand me over to the Russians.

My first inclination was to get the hell out of America. But my wife, Elena, calmed me down and convinced me to stay. Right now, she said, the world wants to know: who is Bill Browder?

She was right. I spent the rest of that day on TV, explaining the Magnitsky Act to anyone whod listen. My main message? Putin is evil, and this idea of his was nothing more than a test for the West. Would the West pass? Only time would tell.

The next morning, at 6:30 a.m., my wife Elena jolted me awake, waving a piece of paper in my face. Youve got to see this, honey!

Elena is originally from Russia, and shed gotten up before sunrise to read the Russian news. That morning, the Russian General Prosecutors Office had issued a list of 11 additional people the Russians wanted the United States to hand over in exchange for the 12 GRU officers. Russians love symmetry in these matters. The United States wanted 12, which meant Russia wanted 12.

I propped myself up and took the paper. The Russians wanted Mike McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia; my friend Kyle Parker, the Congressional staffer who originally drafted the Magnitsky Act; three Special Agents from the Department of Homeland Security who had been involved in investigating a Russian money laundering scheme involving a Cyprus-registered company named Prevezon that had received some of the $230 million; Jonathan Winer, the Washington lawyer and former State Department official who had come up with the original idea for the Magnitsky Act; and David Kramer, another exState Department official and the former head of the human rights NGO Freedom House, whod advocated for the Magnitsky Act alongside Boris Nemtsov and me. There were four additional names on the list, but the main common denominators were either involvement in the Magnitsky Act or participation in the Prevezon case.

What were the Russians accusing us of? The day before, Putin alleged that my business associates and I had earned over $1.5 billion in Russia, never paid any taxes, and then, to get Trumps attention, gave $400 million as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. (The actual amount was zero.) Putin went on to say, We have solid reason to believe that some intelligence officers guided these transactions. Putin was accusing Ambassador McFaul, Kyle Parker, the three DHS agents, and everyone else on the list of being part of my criminal enterprise.

This was classic Russian projection. We werent the victims, they were. They werent the criminals, we were. Instead of the Dmitri Klyuev Organized Crime Group working with corrupt Russian officials to launder vast sums of money, it was the Bill Browder Organized Crime Group working with corrupt American officials to launder vast sums of money.

Elena and I looked at each other and smiled. Once again, Putin had way overplayed his hand.

It was one thing to go after a private person like me, who wasnt even an American citizen. That might have been distasteful, but in the final analysis how many people cared about me? It was entirely different to ask for a former U.S. ambassador, a congressional staffer, and rank-and-file DHS agents. If Trump obliged Putin, it would set a disastrous precedent.

William Browder arrives for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled 'Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to Influence U.S. Elections' in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, July 27, 2017.

Drew AngererGetty Images

The day after that, at a White House press conference, Maggie Haberman from the New York Times asked Trumps press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Russian authorities yesterday named several Americans they want to question that they claim are involved in Bill Browders quote-unquote crimes, in their terms, including the former ambassador to Russia, Mike McFaul. Does President Trump support that idea? Is he open to having US officials questioned by Russia?

This was the moment all of Washington had been waiting for.

Huckabee Sanders didnt waver. The president is going to meet with his team and well let you know when we have an announcement on that. She added that Trump said it was an interesting idea. He wants to work with his team and determine if there is any validity that would be helpful to the process.

What the fuck? They were still thinking about this?!

I felt like the floor had fallen out from under meagain. Every reasonable person in Trumps orbit must have been telling him this was insanity, yet he was still mulling it over.

Luckily, everyone else in Washington seemed to agree with me.

The tidal wave of indignation was towering, and the Senate quickly organized a vote on a resolution calling on Trump never to follow through on Putins incredible offer.

The administration could sense this wave was about to come crashing down on them. An hour before the vote, the White House finally backtracked. Huckabee Sanders announced, It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it.

This was hardly the robust rejection Washington expected. It seemed like Trump was apologizing to Putin, shrugging his shoulders and saying, Hey, buddy, I tried, but they wont let me.

That afternoon, the Senate voted on the resolution. It passed 980.

No one would be handed over to the Russians.

Adapted from Browders new book, Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putins Wrath, published by Simon & Schuster.

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For Putin, It's All About the Money - TIME

As Ukraine and the world await the imminent renewedRussian assault in eastern Ukraine, the battle for Mariupol rages on. After weeks of brutal fighting, theRussian militaryis poised to take the southernUkrainian port cityand finally achieve one of its primary objectives.

The Battle For Mariupol

For weeks now,Mariupolhas defied the numerically superior and better equipped Russian forces. Using anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons supplied by the West, the Ukrainian defenders have exacted a heavy price from the Russian forces for every city block they had to concede.

The Russian military chose a strategy of destruction, bombing everything and reducing the once prosperous port city to piles of rubble. Ukrainian officials estimate that more than 20,000 people have been killed by Russian fire.

Day by day, the Russians advanced and captured more of the city, eventually dividing the defenders into two pockets: the port and the Azovstal iron and steelworks factory.

Over the weekend, the commander of the Russian forces issued a bleak ultimatum to the remaining Ukrainian defenders: surrender or die.

The Ukrainian forces had to respond to the ultimatum by 6 a.m. local time. Keeping up with the fighting spirit they have displayed so far, the Ukrainian defenders have chosen to reject the Russian ultimatum and fight to the death.

They Chose Immortality

But perhaps it was the Philippine Foreign Minister Teddy Locsin Jr. who captured the Ukrainian defenders decision the best.

Told to choose between surrender and death, the encircled Ukrainian soldiers have chosen immortality. This resonates with all of us. Malraux said that courage is another fatherland to which belong all of the brave on all sides of all fights, the Philippine official said on a Tweet.

In a lot of ways, the Russian ultimatum is empty, as the Russians have shown that they cannot be trusted to keep any promises. In Mariupol specifically, they violated agreements on humanitarian corridors multiple times.

Moreover, the Russian military has shown an abhorrent disregard for the lives of Ukrainian civilians, committingwar crimesand other atrocities across Ukraine. So when a Russian commander demands your surrender, you are definitely thinking twice about what that means.

According to an investigative piece by theBritish publication iNews, the Russian military has relocated Ukrainian civilians who lived inMariupoland were found hiding in bomb shelters to a former Russian military base 600 miles from the battlefield. But that base was used as a munitions dump for chemical weapons.

Granted, with tens of thousands of its men dead and wounded in Ukraine, the last thing that the Russian military has to worry about now is where to put displaced Ukrainian civilians. But the fact that the Kremlin is showing such a brazen disregard for the lives and health of civilians is in line with its horrific actions elsewhere in Ukraine.

Should Russian forces capture Mariupol, it will be their biggest conquest in terms of size and population; before the war, Mariupol had a population of almost half a million.

Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyr Zelenskywarned that if Russia killed all of the Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol, there would be no more negotiations.

1945s New Defense and National Security Columnist,Stavros Atlamazoglouis a seasoned defense journalistspecializing inspecial operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured inBusiness Insider,Sandboxx, andSOFREP.

See the rest here:

Is Putin Destined to Win the Battle for Mariupol? - 19FortyFive

Ilya Ponomarev.Valentyn Ogirenko

A Russian politician who was ousted in 2016 is fighting alongside Ukrainian forces.

Ilya Ponomarev told CNN Wednesday that he believed Putin's days in power were numbered.

He called Putin a dictator and said he was confident Ukrainian forces "will prevail."

A former Russian lawmaker fighting for Ukraine told CNN Wednesday he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin's days were numbered because "no dictator can survive after losing the war."

Ilya Ponomarev has been living in Kyiv, Ukraine, since 2016 after he was ousted by the Russian parliament. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the former politician took up arms and joined the Ukrainian forces.

Speaking from Kyiv, Ponomarev told CNN he decided to fight alongside Ukrainian troops because he wanted "to defend humanity and Europe." His role in the forces was unclear.

"No dictator can survive after losing the war," Ponomarev said of Putin, adding that the Russian leader "has no way how he can win the war."

"Putin will try to claim a certain victory an imaginary victory on May 9. I am absolutely certain about this, but the reality is that he is losing the war," he added. "I think that the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people will not stop before Ukrainian territory will be free"

You can watch the full interview here:

May 9, otherwise known as Victory Day, is a major holiday in Russia that commemorates the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and is usually marked with a huge military parade in front of the Kremlin.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said last month that Russian troops were being told the war must end on May 9.

Western officials say Putin will want to have control of the Donbass and other eastern regions of Ukraine by that date, according to CNN.

Ponomarev, who has opposed Putin in the past, was a member of the Russian parliament from 2007 to 2016, Reuters reported. In 2014, he became the only member of the parliament to vote against annexing Crimea.

He was impeached for not performing his duties in 2016 and moved to Kyiv, according to the Russian news agency TAAS.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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Former Russian lawmaker fighting for Ukraine says he thinks Putin's days are numbered because 'no dictator can survive after losing the war' - Yahoo...

Whomever Chimaev was referring to during the U.F.C. broadcast, the fight and the in-ring interview were not seen by mixed martial arts fans in Poland. Polsat, which showed the rest of the U.F.C. 273 card, declined to broadcast the fight between Chimaev and Burns because of Chimaevs post showing his video chat with Kadyrov.

This is a clear signal of mutual support, and with Ukraine under attack from Russia, the post is simply provocative, Polsat said in a statement.

The Treasury Department does not make public the vast majority of enforcement actions it takes, but Jamal El-Hindi, a lawyer at Clifford Chance who spent two decades at the Treasury Department, said the sanctions against Kadyrov and his businesses were far-reaching. They prohibit U.S. citizens and green card holders, as well as anybody on U.S. soil, from interacting with Kadyrov and his businesses.

El-Hindi and other lawyers said sanctions and their enforcement were broad, flexible and opaque precisely because they were designed to be primarily a foreign policy tool.

The purpose of sanctions is to affect foreign policy and have impact, El-Hindi said. To the extent that an enforcement action against somebody who violated sanctions will aid in the foreign policy goal, that is the driver for doing the enforcement.

Before the latest restrictions, in December 2020, dozens of U.F.C. fighters and combat sports celebrities visited Akhmat MMA facilities and attended fights alongside Kadyrov at his invitation. His previous guests included celebrities like the actor Steven Seagal and the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., and former U.F.C. champions like Frank Mir and Khabib Nurmagomedov.

Over the past 15 months, however, there has been a slow, sporadic retreating of Akhmat MMA from the combat sports world in the United States. Fewer fighters have been publicly photographed at Akhmat gyms. YouTube pulled down Akhmat MMAs page last year, saying it had done so because of compliance actions. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, suspended Akhmat MMAs Facebook and Instagram pages after The Times inquired about them in March.

Read more:

Some U.F.C. Fighters Have Ties to a Chechen Leader Loyal to Putin - The New York Times

When I finally talked her into leaving, we were too late: Russian troops had taken over Bucha. The first reports about locals being slaughtered by Russian soldiers started appearing; I could not stop picturing my mother as the next victim. I saw photographs of places Id been to with my mother like a shopping mall near her apartment that had been demolished. I told her not to leave the basement of her building, if possible, but she didnt listen. Only when she came under heavy shelling while shopping for groceries did she stop going out. Shes always been stubborn.

For the next 10 days, she stayed in that basement. There was no electricity or heating, and she was running out of food and water. It was terrifying: Artillery fired nonstop while Russian tanks parked next to her building. When her neighbor tried to take a picture, he was shot luckily, he survived but his apartment was ruined. Not long after, Russian soldiers visited the building: They inspected residents homes, checked passports and took away mobile SIM cards. (My mother, in a remarkable flash of cunning, gave them the wrong one so she could keep in touch with me.)

The ordeal was intolerable. My mother, hungry, exhausted and frightened, finally agreed to leave. Two days later, on March 10, she managed it, escaping through a humanitarian corridor to Kyiv. She was shaken up when I met her. I covered her in all the duvets and blankets I had and put her to bed. But in the night, I could hear her groaning. When I asked her what she was dreaming about, she said that the Russians were torturing her. It was the sign of a trauma that will stay with her for a long while.

The next day I put her on a train to safety. Shes now in western Ukraine, staying with some relatives, an internally displaced person once again. She lost her job and her home, twice. Yet shes lucky to be alive, unlike hundreds of her neighbors buried in Buchas mass graves. They join at least 1,964 other civilians whose lives have been extinguished by Russian force.

Bucha itself, or rather what is left of it, is free now. Russian troops withdrew from Kyivs environs by April 6. Theyre redeploying to the east, where a battle for the Donbas lies in store. The war, which began in the east eight years ago, is returning there for its culmination. Given Russias brutality which now extends to the possible use of chemical weapons in besieged Mariupol its likely to be a terrible contest.

For Ukrainians, it will be the latest installment of horror. But the country, like my family, is standing strong. East and west, displaced and not, Ukrainians have acted with bravery and resilience. No matter what Russia does to us, we refuse to be beaten.

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Opinion | I Didnt Think My Mother Would Escape Putin Twice - The New York Times