4 Jan, 2023 08:48

Ukraine threatens strikes ‘deeper’ into Russia

Kiev’s spy chief said he was happy to see a recent attack on a Russian airbase, but stopped short of taking responsibility for it

There will be new strikes deep into Russian territory, Kirill Budanov, Ukraine’s top spy said on Tuesday. However, he neither denied nor claimed responsibility for a recent attack on a Russian military facility.

Speaking to ABC News, Budanov, who heads Kiev’s Main Intelligence Directorate, was asked whether it was Ukraine which had conducted a recent attack on a Russian airbase. “I can’t give an answer right now to this question. Only after [the] ending of this war,” he replied, adding, though, that he was “glad” to see the strike.

In recent weeks, Moscow has on numerous occasions accused Kiev of carrying out strikes on its military facilities inside Russian territory. Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that a Ukrainian drone attempted to target the Engels airfield in Saratov Region, which hosts strategic bombers. Air defenses shot down the drone, but its debris killed three service members, the ministry said at the time.

The top spy went on to predict thatRussia was about to face additional attacks. These strikes would become “deeper and deeper,” Budanov claimed, alluding that this would also apply to Crimea.

He argued that the peninsula is “part of Ukraine.” “We can use any weapon on our territory,” he stated. Crimea overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in 2014 following a coup in Kiev.

He also thanked the US for providing support to Ukraine, asking Washington to stay the course and promising that results “would not take very long.” “Every taxpayer in the US will be able to see where every cent went,”Budanov said.

After midnight on January 1, Ukraine used US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers to hit a temporary housing area used by Moscow’s forces in the city of Makeyevka in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic. The strikekilled 89 people, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry. It also claimed that the HIMARS launcher was later destroyed in a retaliatory strike.

Kiev's forces have also on numerous occasions used HIMARS systems and other Western-supplied arms to target civilian population in the Donbass area. Between June and early December, Ukraine conducted 185 HIMARS strikes on the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, according to local authorities.

Ukraine has repeatedly asked the US to support it with longer-range weapons. However, Washington has so far been reluctant to meet this request over fears of escalation.

In September, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned the US that should it provide Kiev with such weaponry, it would cross a “red line” and make America “a direct party to the conflict.”

(This will not end well for Ukraine, the current Bidan Admin has some serious karma on their hands. Release the records WW of Bidan and his family on the massive corruption.)

https://www.rt.com/russia/569368-ukraine-strikes-deeper-russia/

4 Jan, 2023 15:16

Russian drones far cheaper than Ukrainian air defenses – NYT

Such an imbalance may cost Kiev and its Western allies dearly, the paper warns

The fact that the smaller kamikaze drones used by Russia are much cheaper than the Ukrainian air defense missiles used against them is creating problems for Kiev and its Western backers, the New York Times has acknowledged.

In an article on Tuesday, the paper didn’t question Kiev’s claims that most of the UAVs launched by Russia are being shot down, but pointed out that even in this case Ukrainian air defense stocks were being exhausted.

“How long can Ukraine sustain its effort when many of its defensive measures cost far more than the drones do?” the NYT wondered.

In addition to trying to destroy the incoming drones with anti-aircraft guns and small-arms fire, Kiev’s forces have “also relied heavily on missiles fired from warplanes and the ground,”which are very expensive, it wrote.

The paper cited the head of the Ukrainian consultancy Molfar, Artem Starosiek, who claimed that using a missile against a UAV costs up to seven times more than the drone itself. The drones that Russia uses are priced at around $20,000 per unit, while a surface-to-air missile from Ukraine’s arsenal ranges from $140,000 for a Soviet-era S-300 to $500,000 for a US-supplied NASAM system, he said.

The article claims that the drones used by Russia in Ukraine are Shahed-136s, supplied by Iran. Thisclaim has been denied by both Moscow and Tehranon many occasions. The Russian Defense Ministry insists that its Geran-2 drones are domestically made, just like all the other hardware used in the military operation against Kiev. The Iranian Foreign Ministry has only confirmed sending a small batch of drones to Russia before the outbreak of the conflict with Ukraine, stressing that no new deliveries have been made since then.

Starosiek nevertheless defended Kiev’s strategy, arguing that it still “costs far less to shoot down a drone than to repair a damaged or destroyed power station.”

However, the NYT warned that the price difference between drones and air defenses was “an imbalance that could over time favor Russia, costing Ukraine and its allies dearly, some analysts say.”

According to estimations by Molfar, Russia has targeted Ukrainian military infrastructure and energy systems with some 600 UAVs since September, when they began to be used more widely.

Russia drastically ramped up its strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure in early October in response to repeated Ukrainian sabotage on Russian soil, including the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, which Moscow blamed on Kiev. Although the attack was widely cheered by top Ukrainian officials, Kiev has denied any involvement.

https://www.rt.com/news/569386-ukraine-drones-iran-defense/

4 Jan, 2023 17:00

New Twitter bombshell: How American spies used false claims of Russian election interference to bring the tech giant to heel

Files reveal how the specter of Moscow's supposed underhand ways was used to subjugate the platform to the US Democratic Party

1 of 2

In a pair of blockbuster #TwitterFiles threads, this week, journalist Matt Taibbi has blown open, even wider, the media giant's concerning collusion with the US national security state. The former Rolling Stone writer exposed how political pressure from the US Democratic Party very effectively forced the company to endorse the lie that its platform was extensively weaponized by Russia, with hugely significant consequences.

Find the "Russian trace" at any cost

The first, boldly titled 'How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In', documents how in August 2017, despite dubious allegations that Russian bots and trolls were responsible for the election of Donald Trump in the mainstream media reaching fever pitch, Twitter's hierarchy knew its platform wasn’t riddled with malign Kremlin-directed actors.

In internal emails, the company’s senior executives and communications professionals almost mocked the idea that it was overrun with Russian bots. They could neither detect “a big correlation” in account activity related to the November 2016 election, nor any “larger patterns” at all. They forecast potentially taking action against less than 25 users. As such, it was decided to simply ignore approaches from the media on the issue.

The next month, Twitter informed the Senate it had suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts. Senator Mark Warner, a ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, immediately held a high-profile press conference to denounce the social network’s response as “frankly inadequate on every level.”

Such pressure, combined with bitter, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declaring, “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare,”forced the social network to set up a dedicated “Russia task force” to investigate the issue. It did – and found nothing. “No evidence of a coordinated approach” between accounts flagged as potentially Kremlin-run was identified, despite an internal “exhaustive” internal investigation

In all, after manually scouring through the posts of thousands of accounts flagged as “suspicious” by external actors, they found that just 32 were questionable, 17 of which were connected with Russia, and only two had spent any money on advertising – one being RT, which was specifically given favorable marketing offers by Twitter before the election.

Again, senior Democratic party officials were enraged by these results. What followed was a flurry of unhinged, sensationalist news stories, claiming Twitter was either covering up the Kremlin’s dirty work for sinister reasons, either by lying about the issue, or actively deleting reams of incriminating data to cover its own tracks.

“Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB … they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,” professor Thomas Rid, an adviser to the Intelligence Committee, remarked to Politico at the time.

Surrender to politics

None of this was true. But it provided the Democrats with ammunition to threaten regulations on Twitter’s political advertising, which could’ve been extremely costly to the company’s revenue. This sent senior staffers into a panic, which was only intensified by the timely leak of a database of thousands of alleged Russian bots and trolls to major media outlets by the Intelligence Committee. This resulted in a flood of aggressive queries from journalists.

Realizing the pressure would only keep mounting – as media outlets and politicians had decided this absolutely was a major scandal, irrespective of the available evidence, and were going to keep pushing until they got what they wanted – Twitter kowtowed, and publicly declared bots and trolls were in fact a massive issue on its platform, and it would be proactive in rooting out such activity in future.

Internally, Twitter executives settled on an informal, secret policy for dealing with rogue actors on the network. Publicly, they would stick to the line content was removed and users were banned “at our sole discretion,”while privately they would “off-board” anything and everything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations,” without argument.

https://www.rt.com/news/569389-politicized-xenophobic-witch-hunt/

>>18073297

New Twitter bombshell…

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Twitter had actively invited US spies to run its moderation process, without anyone knowing, and on the explicit internal understanding they would not be leaving. That sinister penetration widened substantially when Covid-19 arrived in the US, and again the bogeyman of Kremlin “disinformation” was the battering ram.

In February 2020, US State Department intelligence wing the Global Engagement Center published a report, “Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.” It claimed that a vast network of bots and trolls controlled by Moscow and amplified by China and Iran was pumping endless propaganda “describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon.”

The report’s criteria for determining if an account was a bot or troll was, unbelievably, whether the user followed “two or more”Chinese diplomats. The 250,000-strong network included Western government officials, and media outlets, including CNN. Such a weak evidentiary foundation did not deter mainstream journalists publishing countless stories endorsing the report’s findings.

Twitter staff, likely due to past experience at this point, could see what the Center was up to – namely, attempting to “insert themselves”into the “content moderation club” through which Google, Twitter and Facebook were controlled by the FBI, DHS, and other US government agencies. Executives at these tech giants were unanimously opposed to the Center’s inclusion, not least due to its “mandate for offensive” information operations to “promote American interests.”

Hell under the heel

After years of bending over backwards to placate the Democratic establishment, Twitter attempted to push back. Over a series of internal emails, various executives spelled out deep concerns about allowing the Center any influence over the platform, and initially rejected an FBI request for the organization to be included in the moderation club’s regular 'industry call'. It was felt the Center’s involvement would pose “major risks … especially as the election heats up.”

Eventually, the FBI offered a compromise – the CIA, NSA, and Global Engagement Center would be able to simply listen to the industry calls, but wouldn’t be active participants. Twitter relented, a decision its higher-ups seem to have quickly come to regret. Before long, the social network was being bombarded with requests to censor content and ban users from every US government body under the sun.

This extended to US government officials asking for users to be banned because they didn’t personally like an individual in question. Notorious House Intelligence Committee chief Adam Schiff, a Democrat, once asked Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry, due to his critical reporting on the Committee’s work. After initially refusing, Sperry was later suspended.

Almost every other request was granted immediately, even those from the Global Engagement Center. This included demands to ban independent media outlets falsely claimed to be “GRU-controlled” and linked “to the Russian government.” In one email, a former CIA staffer remarked that Twitter would soon be unable to deny a single request. “Our window on that is closing,” they said.

In the weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, Twitter was flooded with demands from so many officials, departments and agencies, they were confused and overworked. If action wasn’t taken promptly, followup emails quickly appeared, asking if action had yet been taken, and if not, why, and when it would be.

In one request, an FBI official even apologized “in advance for your workload.” Once, a no doubt exhausted senior attorney at the social network complained internally, “my inbox is really f***ed up at this point.”

Previous #TwitterFiles threads exposed how the FBI paid the social network $3 million to process its requests. Based on the most recent disclosures, it’s clear the company and its staff were significantly underpaid for their efforts. Future releases promise yet further bombshell revelations, but the long-hidden truths divulged so far should prompt every Twitter user to reflect how the site for many years in secret operated as an effective wing of the US intelligence – and may well still do so.

https://www.rt.com/news/569389-politicized-xenophobic-witch-hunt/

>>18073297

Does anyone get the sense that Elon knows all the games the dishonest gov plays with corporations with threats, leaks, media, accusations etc., and is turning their game on them?

I wonder about what that senator did? I’m sure there are many more congress and senate that are concerned right now.

Of course the files are about the truth the public must know, but there’s other reasons for this. I wonder if the SEC has any skeletons?

>>18073297

This article is interesting because the writer combined prior twitter files with yesterdays, and came up with a more extensive and complete picture. We should do this.

4 Jan, 2023 15:15

German opposition demands defense minister quit

(Or more appropriate title, “WTF is Wrong With Germany?)

The call follows a scandal triggered by Christine Lambrecht's NYE greetings

The leaders of Germany’s largest opposition party – the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – and their Bavarian allies, have demanded Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht be fired amid a scandal over her New Year’s Eve address.

Lambrecht has landed in hot water over her comments on Instagram that the conflict in Ukraine had brought her many “special impressions” and allowed to meet many “interesting and great people.” Her speech was immediately lambasted by opposition politicians and journalists as “embarrassing” and “inappropriate.”

“Every hour that Ms. Lambrecht remains in office weakens the authority of the federal chancellor,” Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU, told the German newspaper Merkur on Wednesday. “The whole of Germany is just shaking its head, not just our soldiers,” he said, adding that “defense experts around the world are speechless over how embarrassing and lacking in expertise a minister in our country can appear in public.”

That sentiment was echoed by Markus Soeder, the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) – the CDU’s longstanding ally.

“This minister must finally resign – or be fired,”Soeder told Merkur, adding that “our soldiers did not deserve this minister.” The CSU leader also said that Chancellor Olaf Scholz must “solve this personnel problem” since it was he, who appointed Lambrecht in the first place.

Lambrecht herself has so far not commented on the scandal. The federal government has also declined to make a statement. “I don't see any reason to evaluate this now,” deputy government spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann told journalists amid the outcry. Scholz previously defended Lambrecht by highlighting her as a “first-class defense minister” in December.

The opposition now accuses the chancellor of intentionally seeking to further weaken the German armed forces by appointing such a defense chief. Lambrecht was supposed to continue the policy devised by Scholz’s Social Democrats for “the unloved child – the Bundeswehr,” Merz told Merkur, claiming it was planned thatthe German army should stay “inconspicuous, unambitious and with an ever-decreasing budget.”

“That’s what the then Federal Minister of Finance, Olaf Scholz, had intended in the financial planning for the Bundeswehr,” he added, referring to the chancellor’s position in the cabinet of his predecessor, Angela Merkel.

https://www.rt.com/news/569390-germany-opposition-defense-minister-quit/

I guess Sweden is not joining NATO soon, Erdogan has his demands

https://www.rt.com/news/569383-sweden-oppose-t%C3%BCrkiye-nato-poll/

4 Jan, 2023 12:33

Ex-Russian space boss sends shrapnel to French ambassador

Dmitry Rogozin is believed to have been wounded in Donetsk by a French-supplied Caesar self-propelled gun

The former head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, who was injured in a Ukrainian strike in Donbass, says he has sent a piece of shrapnel removed from his body and a letter to the French ambassador in Moscow.

Rogozin was wounded in the Russian city of Donetsk on December 21, when the hotel where he was staying came under artillery attack. Russia’s Investigative Committee claims that Kiev’s forces used French-made Caesar self-propelled howitzers, which Paris supplied to Ukraine, to carry out the attack.

The former space boss said he was wounded in the right shoulder with shrapnel which landed “a millimeter” away from his spine. Local medical personnel could not extract the fragment, and Rogozin was transported to Moscow, where he underwent surgery before New Year’s.

On Wednesday, Rogozin told the media that the piece of metal removed from his body was sent to the French envoy in Moscow, Pierre Levy, along with a letter.

“You probably know how many civilians were killed in Donetsk and the frontline cities by French weapons and French mercenaries. It’s hundreds of people, including children,” the letter reads.

Rogozin, who was in Donbass leading the ‘Tsar Wolves’, a group of volunteer military advisers, said he hopes that Levy understands the extent of his personal responsibility for these deaths.

“As for the piece of shrapnel that the surgeons cut out from my spine, I ask you to pass it on to French President Emmanuel Macron. And also tell him that no one will escape responsibility for the war crimes of France, the US, UK, Germany and other NATO countries in Donbass,” he wrote.

The strike on the hotel in Donetsk killed two people, with several others wounded, including the prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Vitaly Khotsenko. Those killed were officers from the Tsar Wolves, Rogozin confirmed, adding that some members of his group were also gravely wounded.

The former space boss, who was once deputy PM and Russia’s envoy to NATO, promised to return to the frontline later this month and continue assisting those taking part in Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.

https://www.rt.com/russia/569377-rogozin-shrapnel-france-ukraine/

Dave Brat talks about the GOP in congress and senate are punished if they represent their own citizens. If they try to fulfill their promises they lose all committee assignments,lose millions for re election (RNC opposed him on re election) and basically attacked by their own leadership. The Cartel in GOP is the same ss democrats.

Every House GOP Member Is Threatened To Support Uniparty Or Have Millions Of Funding Withdrawn

Bannons War Room

January 4, 2023

https://rumble.com/embed/v2198ig/?pub=4

This is actually funny: Russ Vought said today is going to be the day of Slander for those who oppose McCarthy and the DC Cartel

Vought: The D.C. Cartel’s Failure To Secure Kevin As Speaker Adds To The American People’s Leverage

Bannons War Room

January 4, 2023

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