7 Apr, 2022 22:02

Phone call records shed light on what happened near Kiev

Looking for Russian atrocities alleged by Ukraine, Kiev’s security officials and Western journalists find something else

Ukrainian security officials and Western journalists who went looking for Russian atrocities northwest of Bucha in the Kiev region found no signs of human rights abuses, according to phone call records obtained by RT. Instead, locals told journalists the Russian troops gave them food and treated them well. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian official complained that his own side’s militia looted everything.

In a series of satellite phone calls, a reporter identified only as “Simon” tells his colleagues he visited Borodyanka – a town about 25 kilometers northwest of Bucha – and “there’s no bodies in the streets at all,” contrary to what he was led to expect.

The town has been “shelled to pieces,” Simon says, “but there’s no evidence of any rights abuses here at all.” In fact, he and his crew interviewed multiple residents who said the Russian troops had been very friendly and gave them food and water and other supplies. “And we got quotes on camera for that,” he adds.

“I don’t know what the prosecutor was talking about, but we have seen nothing like that, at all. It’s a completely different picture,” Simon tells his colleagues. One French journalist may have seen a body of someone killed by shelling, but “no executions.”

The correspondent ends the call by saying he was going back to Bucha, to “try and find some more evidence of extrajudicial killings there, but there’s no sign of any of that here.”

Ukraine has accused Russia of murdering over 400 civilians in Bucha before retreating from the town near Kiev last week. The US and its allies have accepted Kiev’s claims uncritically, citing them to impose more sanctions against Russia. Moscow has categorically denied the accusations, however, saying that Russian troops pulled out of the town on March 30, and that claims of killings appeared only four days later – after Ukrainian security forces and TV cameras arrived in town.

Another intercepted call, between two Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) officials, revealed the situation in Kukhari, a town about 60 kilometers northwest of Bucha – and it, too, clashes with the prevailing media narrative coming from Kiev and the NATO capitals.

“From March 24 to April 3, after we pushed the ‘orcs’ away from here,” says a SBU official identified only as Sergey Anatolyevich, speaking to someone named Lesogor and using the Ukrainian derogatory term for Russians. “After the unit that pushed them out moved on, the territorial defense came from Malin … and marauded during that time. Looted everything they could. Broke down doors, everything. Safes were opened, cars were stolen. They stuffed the cars with everything worth anything and took it away,” he adds.

“It turns out the ‘Moskals’ took nothing, but ours went in and looted everything,” Sergey Anatolyevich adds, using another derogatory term for Russians. Malin is a nearby town southwest of Kukhari, held by the Ukrainian military.

When Lesogor asks which unit was looting, the other official replies that no one really knows. “Some say Volhynian, others say someone else,” he says, referring to a region in western Ukraine.

https://www.rt.com/russia/553492-kiev-bucha-atrocities-intercepts/

7 Apr, 2022 22:02

HomeWorld News

Pentagon says Russian military won't pick up the phone

Kekkity is there any wonder why? Kekkity

The dearth of communication between the armed forces of Russia and the US continues

US military leaders have had no communication with their counterparts in Moscow since the beginning of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reiterated at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday.

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “and I myself have frequently reached out to our counterparts in Russia to try to ensure that we maintain a dialogue. That’s in the last – since mid-February,” Austin told the senators.

"That’s not been very successful because the Russians have not responded," he added.

While the Pentagon chief said he was “disappointed” by this, he added, “It doesn’t mean we’ll stop reaching out to engage them. I think we have to have the ability to talk to the leadership.”

Austin had been summoned to the Senate to answer questions about the Pentagon’s requested 2023 budget, the largest in US history.

At a March 30 press briefing, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby admitted there had been “no conversations to speak to” with the Russian military, but professed a “willingness to have those discussions,” after a reporter asked whether Washington had been “in touch” with Russia’s military leadership.

“But it's a two-way street. The Russians have to be willing to pick up the phone and thus far they have not been willing to do that,” Kirby added.

US started a cold war and now they are being whiny babies about the obvious outcome. I wonder if Milley has called China yet

https://www.rt.com/news/553500-pentagon-russia-phone-silent/

7 Apr, 2022 22:20

Hackers order Ukrainians to surrender – Meta

A ‘threat group’ is infiltrating Ukrainian news reports with phony surrender orders, says infamous bot-hunter

A ‘threat group’ dubbed Ghostwriter has been spreading phony videos of Ukrainians surrendering and planting fake reports of such surrenders into the chyrons of broadcast news, according to the first quarterly “adversarial threat report” from social media behemoth Meta, published on Thursday.

The Ghostwriter hackers “suddenly” started posting in Polish and English about Ukrainian troops surrendering without a fight and the nation’s leaders fleeing the country the day Russia started its offensive in Ukraine, according to the report, written by Russian troll-hunter turned NATO-backed security ‘expert’ Ben Nimmo. The report attempts to link the Ghostwriter hackers to the Belarusian KGB based on a claim made by fellow hacker-hunters Mandiant Threat Intelligence, which admitted its own assessment was largely based on the hackers’ interests overlapping with those of the Belarusian government.

It’s not clear whether the report’s authors believe that the hackers – government-sponsored or otherwise – actually led anyone to believe the Ukrainians were surrendering on the first day of the war. As the New York Times has admitted, such reports were “not fooling anyone,” suggesting the aim was “to erode confidence in Ukrainian media outlets and institutions.”

Some trust does seem to have been eroded, though as much in Meta’s attribution efforts as in the Ukrainian media. Despite Nimmo’s claims that the Ghostwriter hackers were Belarusian in origin, the Ukrainian experts cited by the Times were certain Russia was to blame. The Meta report focused more on its victory over the group’s efforts to spread the dubious videos via the Facebook accounts of Ukrainian military personnel. While Meta couldn’t stop users from clicking on dubious links in their email, it was apparently somewhat successful at “blocking” the videos hackers had posted from being shared.

The report boasted Meta had removed a “network in Russia” for allegedly abusing the site’s reporting tools in order to “repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations … in an attempt to silence them.” This sounds similar to a tactic Meta users on the other side of the political divide have long accused the platforms’ blue-check “establishment” of using against them. However, not a single such case is cited in the report. It also mentions multiple accounts removed for nothing more than sharing pro-Russian commentary from the Caucasus and Ukraine, admitting that those responsible are merely “politically-aligned non-state actors.”

Meta and its Facebook and Instagram subsidiaries were designated extremist organizations by the Russian government last month after they officially condoned hate speech against Russians amid the conflict in Ukraine and ignored thousands of demands to remove illegal content. While the social media giant later insisted it was only permitting abusive content directed at the “invading Russians” and President Vladimir Putin, it slow-walked the “correction” until the United Nations called out the company for condoning such language.

Nimmo shot to unlikely international prominence in the aftermath of the 2016 US election when several social media users he insisted were Russian bots went on television to prove their humanity. Despite the embarrassment, he has been embraced by groups like the NATO-backed pro-war think tank the Atlantic Council and was hired by Facebook last year to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” – something he likely gained insight into from his stint with the covert UK influence operation Integrity Initiative.

https://www.rt.com/news/553501-meta-report-ukrainian-surrender-trolls/