Highly Recommended Book: Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West
5 out of 5 stars MASTERPIECE: A Staggering, Compelling BRILLIANT book that will stand the test of time.
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Untitled-Camilla-Bartlett/dp/0374238715/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&ie=UTF8&keywords=putin%27s%20people&language=en_US&qid=1593832667&sr=8-1
I have read/listened to many books connected to the whole Trump/Russia saga. This book is on a category of its own. It's a very in-depth look at the development of Russia from the collapse of the USSR to the present and how the KGB and the Russian mob penetrated the government and turned Russia into a mafia state. The book describes and intertwines Putin's biography with the USSR's need to send money to the West and how that led to the development of complex money laundering networks that have bred characters like our own Donald J Trump.
This book made me understand everything about how Putin's mindset works and how his contextual experience may have formed his views and led to the installation of his puppet president in the USA; how and why the mob and the KGB forced businessmen to work for them informally or die/ lose everything. It explains how Kompromat has fueled Russia's upper echelons and how they have now exported this model to the US. Kompromat and money laundering bred the orange rat officially known as 'president'.
The book is impeccably researched, written by a person who clearly speaks Russian. The author has lived there and has a very in-depth understanding of Russian culture AND the storytelling is just as fascinating as the factual information she has gathered. It's a legit MASTERPIECE that explains what happened to Russia and how they applied their mafia-KGB-style method to the rest of the world.
Documentary "The Oligarchs" : What Ukraine's recent past can teach us about Trump, money laundering and puppet presidents
As you guys know I have a thing for documentaries and recently I came across this excellent documentary about Oligarchs in Ukraine and Russia.
It explains how oligarchs are connected in Ukraine and how they paid for the election of Viktor Yanukovych. Paul Manafort, who is now in prison, was hired by oligarchs to create Yanukovych’s campaign and lead him to win the election, which he did.
Yanukovych was not just elected, but eventually deposed after a popular uprising. Which in some ways, parallels what is happening here now. There is a passage in this documentary that shows footage of Yanukovych leaving Ukraine in the middle of the night, ‘rescued’ as it were by a Russian helicopter. He is now living in Russia.
This is not THAT different from the situation we are living with Trump. His election was managed by Manafort, he was created and propped by an adversary to harm his own country. Just like Yanukovych.
This documentary also does a fantastic job of explaining how money laundering works and how these oligarchs use shadow companies to transfer dirty money, often literally stolen from the Ukranian treasury. It also brings up some new oligarchs I had never heard of, who just happen to be connected to Giuliani and Trump. One of them in fact, was negotiating for Trump Tower Moscow…
Which reminds me of how I first found it. I was looking up "Pavel Fuchs and Giuliani" and documentary came up. Pavel Fuchs is an oligarch I had never heard of who is supposedly being investigated at SDNY in the Lev/Igor/Giuliani case. This WSJ article explains the connection between Giuliani, Fuks and Trump:
In May 2017, Giuliani Security & Safety inked a contract with the city administration of Kharkiv to streamline municipal emergency services, according to the company. A person familiar with the negotiations said Pavel Fuks, a Kharkiv native who had made a fortune in Russian real estate, paid the contract. Mr. Fuks didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on that arrangement.
About a decade earlier, Mr. Fuks had negotiated with Mr. Trump to license the Trump brand for a tower that Mr. Fuks was building, with other partners, in the Russian capital’s Moscow City, Mr. Fuks said at the time. The deal didn’t come together.
Bellingcat: the innovative data-driven investigators tracking the moves of the GRU military unit that paid off bounties in Afghanistan
Bellingcat is a pioneer in data journalism. They were the ones to find out the identities of the GRU members tasked with carrying out the the Skripal assassination in the UK. Two years later, it turns out it’s this unit that will have offered bounties for killings of American and British soldiers in Afghanistan. Before any of this exploded into the mainstream there was the work of Bellingcat.
They use location, government and other data, searching image databases and innovative means of gathering information and translating all of it into compelling true-spy-crime storytelling.
Their investigative articles are fascinating, detailed and go back to what many of us expect from journalism: gathering facts and putting stories together, with an added use of innovative technology.
The New York Times: Trump chose to do nothing when Russia offered bounties to kill American soldiers.
Earlier on Friday June 26, 2020 the New York Times published an article describing the bounty and the fact that Trump was briefed about and chose to do nothing. As Project Lincoln said: he stands with the troops. Just not OUR troops.
Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.
The Unit that paid the bounty is the same one that carried out the Skripal poisoning in the UK
This GRU unit is the same that was involved in the Skripal assassination/poisoning among other subversive/murderous acts in Eastern European countries like Bulgaria.
The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.
Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.
Before giant newspapers picked up on these stories, Bellingcat was there first. You can read more of Bellingcat’s articles related to GRU’s Unit 29155 here.
In 2018 a documentary was made about them called “Bellingcat: Truth in a post-truth world”
You can watch it on a Dutch website (it’s in English with Dutch subtitles). Click on the image below to watch it.
RECOMMENDED DOCUMENTARY: The Roger Ailes Story
Divide and Conquer": The Roger Ailes Story
Asha Rangappa, former FBI agent and legal analyst, recommended this documentary earlier today and I just watched it, it’s another one of these fascinating documentaries that explain our current situation. It’s available on HULU if you already have the subscription and you can also find it on other websites to rent/buy.
Asha’s post had mentioned the importance of racism to Fox News and 22 mins in, it has already discussed the importance of fear to the Fox News network. Which reminds of the what I tell people all the time: fear is a huge red flag, stay away from any and all content that plays on and advocates for fear. It does not come from the right place. UPDATE: Finished watching it. Very interesting. We really should think deeper about the power media has had over us, and how Fox News, particularly, has worked tirelessly to divide us, to exploit fear for political and financial gain.
In 2020, it is satisfying to see that at the very end of his life, the truth about who he really was, came out. He was fired from Fox, shunned and died a pariah to Rupert Murdoch. Still it’s fascinating to see how so many of these so-called ‘conservatives’ have led similar lives of sanctimonious, moralistic lecturing while leading depraved, hypocritical lives behind the scenes.
At a time when America is finally acknowledging and standing up against racism, the business model of Fox News, Donald J. Trump, Brexit, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu is at risk. Sowing division and hatred for political and financial gain is no longer safe.
Although we tend to split the lines of political spheres between left and right, the red flag of politics is fear. Shady actors telling us not to trust one another, selling purity tests that Only They Can Pass don’t have what it takes to unite us. Choose unity over division and acceptance over fear.
The new era shaping up is far less likely to embrace fear-mongering products and world views.