3 Jul, 2023 18:16

Ukraine keeps no secrets from CIA – Zelensky

Ukrainian president admitted to having close ties with the US agency but wants them to remain “behind the scenes”

Kiev does not keep “any secrets” from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), President Vladimir Zelensky has admitted. He made the remarks in an exclusive interview with CNN, aired on Monday, expressing “surprise” that his recent meeting with CIA boss William Burns got into the media limelight.

“My communication with the CIA chief should always be behind the scenes. We discuss important things – what Ukraine needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act,” Zelensky stated.

Kiev remains in close cooperation with the American spy agency, Zelensky admitted, adding that the country virtually has no secrets from the CIA. Ukrainian spy agencies maintain contacts with the CIA, he added, without specifying the agencies in question.

We don’t have any secrets from the CIA because we have good relations and our intelligence services talk with each other.

“The situation is pretty straightforward. We have good relations with the CIA chief, and we are talking. I told him about all the important things related to the battlefield that we need,”Zelensky explained.

Media in America reported on Burns’ most recent visit of the to Kiev over the weekend. Apart from meeting Zelensky himself, the agency director was said to have also held talks with unspecified Ukrainian intelligence officials.

Director Burns recently traveled to Ukraine, as he has done regularly since the beginning of Russia’s recent aggression more than a year ago,” an anonymous US official told CNN. “As with other trips, the director met with his Ukrainian intelligence counterparts and President Zelensky, reaffirming the US commitment to sharing intelligence to help Ukraine defend against Russian aggression.”

Apart from acknowledging Kiev’s close ties with the CIA, Zelensky reiterated his war goals, once again pledging to conquer the Crimean Peninsula. Crimea split from Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup, voting overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia in a referendum.

“We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet,” Zelensky stressed, addingthat any scenario without seizing Crimea from Russia would not count as a “victory” for the country.

(So Ukraine is going to force a district that chose to leave Ukraine by a legal vote to join Russia, is going to force the 2.6 million citizens to be ruled under Ukraine? Sounds very communist and dictatorship to me. Only so they can deny Russia a warm water port for their ships!)

https://www.rt.com/russia/579150-ukraine-cia-no-secrets/

3 Jul, 2023 20:27

Moscow slams Zelensky’s statements on Crimea

The Ukrainian president believes Kiev cannot achieve “victory” without seizing the peninsula from Russia

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky “cannot imagine” the country without the Crimean peninsula, and any scenario without conquering it would not count as a “victory” for Kiev. Zelensky made the remarks in an exclusive interview with CNN, which aired on Monday.

“We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under Russian occupation, it means only one thing: The war is not over yet,” he stated.

Zelensky ruled out achieving peace without conquering the peninsula somehow. “It will not be a victory then,” he insisted, doubling down on the repeated promise by the country’s top officials to take Crimea back from Russia.

Moscow has condemned the remarks, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stating thatsuch pledges only further expose the “Nazi essence” of Zelensky’s regime.

“For many years [Zelensky] imagined Crimea without water. And now even without the Crimeans,” Zakharova wrote in a Telegram post, referring to the years-long water blockade imposed by Kiev on the peninsula, as well as repeated promises by top Ukrainian officials to persecute its residents for “collaborating” with Russia. “That’s the Nazi essence of the little Kiev Napoleon,” she added, in an apparent reference to the Napoleon role played by Zelensky during his time as a comedian.

Crimea broke away from Ukraine shortly after the 2014 Maidan coup, which deposed the democratically-elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich. Afterwards, the peninsula joined Russia, with its population overwhelmingly backing the reunification idea during a referendum.

Since then, seizing Crimea back from Russia has become a top talking point for Ukrainian officials.

https://www.rt.com/russia/579156-zelensky-crimea-victory-statements/

DeSantis PAC official says 2024 election an uphill battle: 'Trump is the runaway front-runner'(Cortes the traitor admits the obvious)

by David Zimmermann, News Intern

July 03, 2023 05:31 PM

A top official for Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) PAC said the Florida governor faces an “uphill battle” in the 2024 GOP presidential race, adding, “Trump is the runaway front-runner.”

Steve Cortes, who once served as a campaign adviser to former President Donald Trump, admitted on a Twitter Spaces session Sunday night thatDeSantis is not faring well in the key nominating states, Politico reported.

“Right now in national polling, we are way behind, I’ll be the first to admit that,” said Cortes. “I believe in being blunt and honest. It’s an uphill battle, but clearly Donald Trump is the runaway front-runner.”

“In the first four states which matter tremendously, polls are a lot tighter, we are still clearly down.We’re down double digits; we have work to do,” Cortes added.

The four early presidential primary states for the 2024 election are Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, all of which see DeSantis trailing Trump by a considerable amount.

The ex-Trump adviser said DeSantis could better compete with Trump once voters understand where the governor is coming from and what he wants to accomplish during a possible presidency. However, Cortes expressed concern that healthy competition between the two GOP candidates could win Trump the general election in the end.

“If we do not prevail — and I have every intent on winning, I didn’t sign up for this to come in second — but if we do not prevail, I will tell you this, we will make President Trump better for having this kind of primary,” he said.

Despite previously working for Trump, Cortes was one of the many to endorse DeSantis, saying in May he is the "best possible option to win the presidency in 2024."

When asked to comment, Bryan Griffin, press secretary for the Florida governor’s presidential campaign, expressed full confidence in DeSantis’s bid for the 2024 presidency against Trump, saying the governor “has been underestimated in every race he has won, and this time will be no different.

“Donald Trump has to explain to Republican voters why he didn't do the things he is now promising in his first term as president,” Griffin told the Washington Examiner. “Governor Ron DeSantis over-delivered on his promises as governor and has the national vision we need to restore our country, clean out DC, and lead our Great American Comeback.This campaign is a marathon, not a sprint; we will be victorious.” (Kek says the billionaire wasting millions!)

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/desantis-pac-official-2024-election-uphill-battle

Sound of Freedom: The film you almost never had the chance to see

July 03, 2023 04:10 PM

When Eduardo Verastegui learned about Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit organization that works to save children from sex trafficking, he knew he wanted to tell its story. Specifically, he wanted to tell the story of Tim Ballard, its founder and CEO.

Ballard had spent more than a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. When he realized that there were real children who couldn’t be saved without cutting an impossible amount of government red tape, he left in 2013 to create OUR, which boasts 4,000-plus predators arrested and 6,000-plus survivors recovered.

In addition to aftercare and preventative efforts, its website notes, the organization goes “to the darkest corners of the world to assist law enforcement in rescuing children.”

Statistics on human trafficking are hard to compile, but theState Department reportsthat it has 27.6 million global victims. Many of these are children, and many of them are continuing to be exploited right here in the U.S., not just through physical violence, but also a seemingly endless supply of child pornography. (OUR claims that “Americans are some of the top consumers AND producers of child pornography.”)

So when Verastegui, a film producer, heard about Ballard’s story and the problem of child sex trafficking in the U.S., he thought, “I am a filmmaker. I ask myself, ‘What can I do?’ A movie. I have a weapon of mass instruction, and inspiration.”

At the premiere of the finished movie, Sound of Freedom, in Washington, D.C., Verastegui told the Washington Examiner that this all happened eight years ago, so even after the film was finished in 2018, there was no one who wanted to distribute it for years. Netflix passed. Amazon passed. Every studio was worried about losing money.

“That,” Verastegui said, “broke my heart.”

He said that people who saw the film cried; some gave it a standing ovation. But the “experts” didn’t seem to get it. “Something’s weird here,” he said.

It didn’t matter that Sound of Freedomfocused on high-stakes drama, showing Ballard (played by The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel) and his partners working with local government officials in South America to lure pimps and pedophiles and rescue the children in their clutches before it’s too late — like if Taken were based on a true, gut-wrenching story.

Then Verastegui met Neal Harmon, co-founder and CEO of Angel Studios, last fall. Angel Studios is the crowd-funded media company famous for distributing The Chosen, a TV show about the life of Jesus Christ. A few months after meeting Harmon, Verastegui pitched Angel Studios on the film, and things moved quickly. After the studio showed the film to investors who were enthusiastic about the project, it agreed in March to distribute Sound of Freedom.

Jordan Harmon, brother of Neal and co-founder of Angel Studios, told the Washington Examiner that in fewer than 10 days, some 7,200 people invested $5 million in a fund to get the movie “out into the world.”

Now filmmakers are hoping that the movie, which comes out Tuesday, July 4, will draw 2 million viewers at its theatrical release to represent the 2 million children trafficked globally. But they emphasize that the point of the movie isn’t to preach to its viewers.

“When you go to a movie and you buy a ticket, you don’t go to be preached at; you go to be entertained,” the film’s director, Alejandro Monteverde, told the Washington Examiner. “So my goal as a filmmaker is how can I take entertainment and marry it to meaning?”

Monteverde describes himself as a “lone wolf,” saying the people the filmmakers originally tried to partner with for the film didn't understand its meaning — until Angel Studios.

“As a filmmaker, as a storyteller, I realized that a lot of my peers were doing one type of a film as a voice — not as a genre, but as a voice,” he said. “I realized that I wanted to go in a different direction. I wanted to make films that I was called to make.”

The film’s eight-year journey from an idea to a two-hour-long product ready to be released in theaters has been anything but orthodox. Monteverde admits that even the release date — July 4 — may be risky, but as a self-proclaimed underdog, he welcomes the challenge.“The bigger the giant, the greater the glory,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Bring it on. Let’s see what happens.’”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/sound-of-freedom-the-film-you-almost-never-had-the-chance-to-see