Reporting that Ukrainian efforts to retake Russia-occupied territory have been “bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships,” The New York Times reports that Ukrainian forces have switched tactics to using “artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire.”
Then the article gets really freaky:
“American officials are worried that Ukraine’s adjustments will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could benefit President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition. But Ukrainian commanders decided the pivot reduced casualties and preserved their frontline fighting force.
“American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive. Almost any big push against dug-in Russian defenders protected by minefields would result in huge numbers of losses.”
I’m sorry, US officials “fear” that Ukraine is becoming “casualty averse”? Because safer battlefield tactics that burn through a lot of ammunition don’t chew through lives like charging through a minefield under heavy artillery fire?
What are the Ukrainians supposed to be? Casualty amenable? If Ukraine was more casualty amenable, would it be more willing to throw young bodies into the gears of this proxy war that the US empire activelyprovoked and killed peace deals to maintain?
Something tells me that the US officials speaking to The New York Times about their “fear” of Ukrainian casualty aversiveness do not know what real fear is. Something tells me that if you marched these US officials through Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships, then they would understand fear.
Western officials have been spending the last few weeks whining to the media that Ukraine’s inability to gain ground is due to an irrational aversion to being killed. They’ve been decrying Ukrainian cowardice to the press under cover of anonymity, from behind the safety of their office desks.
In an article published Thursday titled “U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal,” The Washington Post cited anonymous “U.S. and Western officials” to report that the massive losses Ukraine has been suffering in this counteroffensive had been “anticipated” in war games ahead of time, but that they had “envisioned Kyiv accepting the casualties as the cost of piercing through Russia’s main defensive line.”
The same article quotes Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba telling critics of the counteroffensive to “go and join the foreign legion” if they don’t like the results so far, adding, “It’s easy to say that you want everything to be faster when you are not there.”
In an article published last month titled “U.S. Cluster Munitions Arrive in Ukraine, but Impact on Battlefield Remains Unclear,” The New York Times reported unnamed senior US officials had “privately expressed frustration” that Ukrainian commanders “fearing increased casualties among their ranks” were switching to artillery barrages, “rather than sticking with the Western tactics and pressing harder to breach the Russian defenses.”
“Why don’t they come and do it themselves?” a former Ukrainian defense minister told The New York Times in response to the American criticism.
In an article last month titled “Ukraine’s Lack of Weaponry and Training Risks Stalemate in Fight With Russia,” The Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed western military officials “knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons” needed to dislodge Russia, but that they had “hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day” anyway.
“It didn’t,” Wall Street Journal added.
In the same article, The Wall Street Journal cited a US Army War College professor named John Nagle admitting that the US itself would never attempt the kind of counteroffensive it’s been pushing Ukrainians into attempting.
“America would never attempt to defeat a prepared defense without air superiority, but they [Ukrainians] don’t have air superiority,” Nagl said, adding, “It’s impossible to overstate how important air superiority is for fighting a ground fight at a reasonable cost in casualties.”
And now we’re seeing reports in the mass media that US officials — still under cover of anonymity of course — are beginning to wonder if perhaps it might have been better to try to negotiate peace instead of launching this counteroffensive that they knew was doomed from the beginning.
In an article titled “Milley had a point,” Politico cites multiple anonymous US officials saying that as “the realities of the counteroffensive are sinking in around Washington,” empire managers are beginning to wonder if they should have heeded outgoing Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley’s suggestion back in November that it was a good time to consider peace talks.
“We may have missed a window to push for earlier talks,” one anonymous official says, adding, “Milley had a point.”
Oops. Oops they made a little oopsie poopsie. Oh well, it’s only Ukrainian lives.
Imagine reading through all this as a Ukrainian, especially a Ukrainian who’s lost a home or a loved one to this war. I imagine white hot tears pouring down my face. I imagine rage, and I imagine overwhelming frustration.
This whole war could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few mild concessions to Moscow. It could have been stopped in the early weeks of the conflict back when a tentative peace agreement had been struck. It could have been stopped back in November before this catastrophic counteroffensive.
But it wasn’t. The US had an agenda to lock Moscow into a costly military quagmire with the goal of weakening Russia, and to this day US officials openly boast about all this war is doing to advance US interests. So they’ve kept it going, using Ukrainian bodies as a giant sponge to soak up as many expensive military explosives as possible to drain Russian coffers while advancing US energy interests in Europe and keeping Moscow preoccupied while the empire orchestrates its next move against China.
Last month The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote an article explaining why westerners shouldn’t “feel gloomy” about how things are going in Ukraine, writing the following about how much this war is doing to benefit US interests overseas:
“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”
“Other than for the Ukrainians” he says, as a parenthetical aside.
Everyone who supported this horrifying proxy war should have that paragraph tattooed on their fucking forehead.
When it got out that a new Russian think tank focused on understanding the fast-growing Moscow-Beijing axis might be called the “Xi Jinping Thought Laboratory,” eyebrows were raised in the Russian media.
Later, the new center was given the more inclusive title of the Laboratory of Modern Ideology of China.
But Kirill Babaev, director of the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, which hosts the new center, says that the galloping ideological convergence between Russia and China requires close attention since it drives the rapid growth of relations in what may be the most important emerging bloc on earth. At least the Chinese side of it, he says, largely boils down to the speeches and ideas of Mr. Xi, who seems likely to remain at the helm in Beijing for a long time to come.
“Interest toward our eastern partner is really great and growing,” he says. “More and more people want to study Chinese, are interested in Chinese movies or literature, are keen to visit China as tourists, or start up a business with Chinese partners. … The more we know about our partners, the more objective and correct this knowledge will be, the better it is for the development of friendly and mutually beneficial relations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Mr. Xi have met over 40 times in the past decade, and experts say that they tend to agree on most things, especially the joint urge to curb U.S. hegemony and establish a multipolar world order in its place.
“Both countries feel alienated by the outside world,” says Alexei Maslov, a China expert with Moscow State University. “Russia and China feel that the present world order is not fair toward them, and both want to play a greater role in global affairs. … Though they are very different historically and culturally, both countries are based on the same foundation of a strong state and personal leadership. Hence we see an affinity not just between Putin and Xi, but all the way down the chain of officials and business leaders.”
A common vision for the future?
The evolving relationship between Moscow and Beijing has invited skepticism, in part because the record of Russia-China friendship is dismal.
There is a long history of animosity between the two countries, mutual suspicion continues to run deep, and previous attempts to establish an alliance have ended very badly. Critics point to continued competition between the two in areas like Africa and Central Asia, and the fact that relations with the West remain more important for both, especially China, than relations with one another.
Optimists point to the potential synergies between a vast but largely empty Russia, with a cornucopia of raw materials and immense tracts of unused agricultural land, and the teeming workshop of China next door, still in the throes of urbanization.
A survey conducted by the state-funded Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) earlier this year found that 77% of Russians regard China as a “friendly” power, and 78% think cooperation between the two countries will bring “more good than harm.” Another poll, carried out in March by the state-funded VTsIOM agency, found that 56% of Russians consider China a “strategic and economic partner” and that 53% think this is the right direction to go.
The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, began the long process of rapprochement with China with a visit to Beijing in 1989 after decades of hostility between the two communist powers. But subsequent Russian leaders, primarily Mr. Putin, made substantive progress by resolving outstanding territorial disputes along their common 2,500 mile frontier, signing major trade deals, and forging what increasingly looks like a powerful new geopolitical compact.
“Russia and China share a common vision on the future of international relations, which includes fair treatment for all, respect for all types of government and social structures, no hegemony, and no imposing of anyone’s political principles,” says Mr. Babaev. “This is an ideological alliance, which is much stronger than any military one.”
Potential, but not boundless
Russia’s turn toward Asia, and China in particular, has been greatly accelerated by souring relations with the West since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The barrage of Western sanctions since Russia invaded Ukraine last year has made it a matter of urgent necessity for Moscow. China’s own disputes and tariff wars, especially with the U.S., have boosted the tendency for the two Asian giants to seek common ground and joint solutions.
At least on paper, the results are impressive. In the first half of this year alone, trade turnover increased by almost 40% with Russia redirecting to Asia energy exports that formerly went to Europe, and buying much more from China, including consumer goods such as household appliances, automobiles, and textiles.
The list of long-term joint ventures, largely an outgrowth of agreements at the highest level, looks substantial, including space, aviation, energy infrastructure, and nuclear engineering.
But, beneath the hype, some of those deals are reportedly troubled. A $50 billion venture to build a new passenger jet to compete in global markets has run into hot water over Chinese insistence on bringing in Western aviation companies according to media reports. Likewise the much discussed Power of Siberia II gas pipeline project, which Russia hopes would replace the now-defunct Nordstream pipelines to Europe, remains mired in red tape and a Chinese reluctance to commit.
“Even if China grants permission [for the new pipeline], it will take up to 15 years to put the necessary infrastructure into place,” says Mikhail Krutikhin, an independent energy consultant. “It’s not going to be possible for Russia to replace its former European gas markets for many years to come.”
Experts also point out that the impressive influx of Chinese consumer products into the Russian market, replacing the exodus of Western companies in the wake of the Ukraine war, comes at a price. For example, Chinese automobile sales in Russia have tripled, but it mostly involves finished products from China that take the market share of Western brands that were formerly assembled in Russia.
“Russian authorities used to insist on the localization of production, but now they are in no position to make the rules,” says Natalia Zubarevich, an expert with Moscow State University. “Russian industry has refocused on supplies from China, which is critical to survival. But it comes at the expense of diversified markets and supply chains, which is always better than dependence on one partner.”
One overriding question concerns China’s support for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. A Chinese peace plan floated earlier this year seems to have fizzled. There are also conflicting reports about the firmness of Chinese backing and whether it is prepared to help Russia with lethal military aid.
That’s one of the questions that Mr. Babaev, of the China Institute, hears frequently.
“While China definitely wants peace in Europe as soon as possible, it will never allow Russia to lose,” he says. “Russia does not seem to need much help today, but in case Russia needs something tomorrow I am pretty sure China will help.”
By John Solomon and Steven Richards, Just the News, 8/21/23
Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.
The recommendation is one of several U.S. government memos gathered by Just the News over the last 36 months from Freedom of Information Act litigation, congressional inquiries and government agency sources that directly conflict with the long-held narrative that Biden was conducting official U.S. policy when he threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to force Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the country’s equivalent of the American attorney general.
At the time the threat was made in December 2015, Shokin’s office was conducting an increasingly aggressive corruption investigation into Burisma Holdings, an energy firm the State Department deemed to have been engaged in bribery and that employed Hunter Biden and paid him millions while his father was vice president.
New details on the impact of that probe have emerged in recent days.
Shokin’s pursuit was rattling Burisma, and the firm was putting pressure on Hunter Biden to deal with it, according to recent testimony and interviews with Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner and fellow Burisma board member.
The memos obtained by Just the News show:
-Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office’s work.
-U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
-A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.
During Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019, State officials testified that Hunter Biden’s acceptance of a job at Burisma at a time when his father was vice president created the appearance of a conflict of interest but did not materially impact U.S. policy in Ukraine.
But in a private, classified email shared with Just the News, one of the top U.S. officials in the Kyiv embassy told then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch at the end of the Obama administration that Hunter Biden had, in fact, impacted the U.S. anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.
“The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules,” embassy official George Kent wrote to Yovanovitch in the Nov. 22, 2016, email marked “confidential.”
Joe Biden’s role in pressuring then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in December 2015 to fire Shokin has been a searing controversy since April 2019, when the lead author on this story, as a columnist for The Hill, unearthed a 2018 videotape of the former vice president bragging about his role to a foreign policy think tank.
At the time Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption, the company was paying Hunter Biden and Archer, $83,333 a month as board members.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted in the speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
The disclosure prompted then-President Donald Trump to ask Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate.
Democrats howled and eventually impeached Trump in late 2019. The Senate acquitted the former president. Today, the original column that prompted the controversy is preserved in the official records of Congress.
Evidence would show during impeachment and afterward that Biden’s conversation with Poroshenko occurred during a trip to Kyiv in December 2015. Under withering pressure from U.S. and Western officials, the Ukrainian president eventually buckled and persuaded Shokin to resign a few months later in March 2016. Poroshenko would tell Biden there was no evidence Shokin had done anything wrong but he forced the resignation anyway to appease the president.
“Despite of the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him … No, it was the day before yesterday. I especially asked him to resign,” Poroshenko told Biden in an audio tape call from March 2016 that was eventually released by a Ukrainian lawmaker in 2020.
The narrative from Biden’s defenders and government officials who testified at Trump’s first impeachment was that Biden’s action in withholding the U.S. loan guarantees had nothing to do with his son’s role at Burisma and that officials across the West and inside the U.S. government were clamoring to fire Shokin because he was deemed corrupt.
Kent, for instance, answered “he did” when he was asked during his impeachment testimony whether Biden acted consistent with U.S. policy when he used the loan guarantee as leverage to force Shokin’s firing.
“I did nothing wrong,” Biden said during 2019 CNN-New York Times debate. “I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. And that’s what we should be focusing on.”
Multiple lawyers who worked on Trump’s impeachment defense as well as some of the GOP House impeachment members told Just the News they did not recall ever seeing the documents unearthed by Just the News and said they would have made a significant difference to the impeachment case.
“This new evidence being uncovered and reported by Just The News is incredibly significant,” said former New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin. “It directly undercuts multiple false narratives that were being pushed by Congressional Democrats, some of their key impeachment witnesses, and Democrat allies in the media.”
Jay Sekulow, a lawyer who helped lead Trump’s legal team during the impeachment, said he did not believe the defense had access to such memos.
“The fact of the matter is none of these documents were handed over to us,” he said. “Our legal team never received documents from the House impeachment. So of course, they’re not obligated to in the sense of like in a courtroom. But when you have exculpatory documents, you would think that under just a good faith standards of the House of Representatives would have said, ‘You know, here’s what we’ve got.'”
Sekulow continued: “But of course, they weren’t going to do that. Because as soon as they did that, everyone knew their narrative was false.”
Some, but not all, of the memos were turned over in late 2020 to the Senate Homeland Security Committee during its probe of the Biden family finances, but they arrived too late to impact most of the interview the panel did or to make it into the panel’s final report, Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson’s office said.
In 2020, current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, then State’s top expert on Ukraine, gave Johnson’s investigators a more specific timetable on when her department determined Shokin had to go, saying the concerns dated to summer of 2015 and involved the failure of Shokin’s office to prosecute former members of ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
“The initial expectation, when we began talking about the third loan guarantee, which I believe was in the summer of 2015, was that Prosecutor General Shokin make more progress than we had seen to clean up corruption inside the Prosecutor General’s Office itself – I’ll now refer to that as the PGO – and that he make more progress in mounting big corruption cases, including against Yanukovych cronies, that he make more progress in investigating the hundred dead on the Maidan by snipers during 2013-2014,” she told Senate investigators in the deposition.
“So the first press was to see him make the Prosecutor General’s Office, the PGO, clean and effective, so that’s what we started pressing in August, September, October.
“You see that pressed in the speech that Ambassador Pyatt gives in Odessa. You see it in my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October of 2015. … It was a policy that was coordinated tightly with the Europeans, with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. But not only did we not see progress, we saw the PGO go backward in this period,” she also said.
Another element of the Democrat-fed, media-driven narrative was that Shokin wasn’t really investigating Burisma and there was no threat to the company.
But key elements of that narrative have now been challenged since Archer told Congress that Burisma hired Hunter Biden in 2014 to gain access to a family “brand,” including his father, that would scare away prosecutors trying to investigate the company for corruption.
“People would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer testified, describing the value Hunter brought to the company.
In a separate interview with TV host Tucker Carlson, Archer said that at the time Biden forced Shokin’s firing because he was posing a major threat to Burisma by going after the assets of the owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
“He was a threat,” Archer said. “He ended up seizing assets of Mykola – a house, some cars, a couple properties. And Mykola actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets.”
Archer told Carlson that while pressure was being applied to Hunter Biden, the Burisma board was being told that Shokin was being dealt with and could stay in the job. But Archer added that he now doubts the story being told to the board.
The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee said Archer’s testimony and other evidence it has gathered shows that by late 2015 Burisma was pressuring Hunter Biden to do something about Shokin, who had stepped up his probe of the energy company after then-U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech in September 2015 in Odessa, Ukraine, urging more action against the firm.
“In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin,” the committee stated in a memo in late July.
Government memos obtained by Just the News also directly conflict with the narrative, showing the State Department was actually sending a different message to Shokin, the Ukrainian government and to Joe Biden before a sudden pivot in late November 2015.
For instance, Nuland sent a letter to Shokin in June 2015 on behalf of then-Secretary of State John Kerry congratulating Shokin and suggesting they were “impressed” about the job he was doing on corruption reforms. The letter was so important it was hand-delivered by Pyatt, according to the memos Just the News gathered.
“Secretary Kerry asked me to reply on his behalf to your letter of May 13, 2015, discussing Ukraine ‘s efforts to address corruption, including through implementation of the new anti-corruption strategy and reform of the Prosecutor General’s Office,” Nuland wrote in the June 11, 2015, memo obtained through a FOIA lawsuit.
“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” Nuland continued. “The challenges you face are difficult, but not insurmountable. You have an historic opportunity to address the injustices of the past by vigorously investigating and prosecuting corruption cases and recovering assets stolen from the Ukrainian people. The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner.”
Those upbeat sentiments remained strong heading into fall 2015 inside the IPC task force charged with monitoring Shokin and determining whether Joe Biden should deliver new U.S. aid to Ukraine at the end of the year.
In its September 2015 meeting, the IPC affirmed that Shokin’s reform effort – including the creation of a new independent inspector general watchdog to police prosecutors’ behavior – was advancing enough to warrant the new loan guarantee
“All, thank you for a productive meeting yesterday. Please find a SOC below. It was agreed: The IPC concluded that (1) Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee and (2) Ukraine has an economic need for the guarantee and it is in our strategic interest to provide One,” Christina Segal-Knowles, the Obama White House director of International Economic Affairs, wrote to top officials from the NSC, DOJ, Treasury and State who advised the task force.
“As such, the IPC recommends moving forward with a third loan guarantee for Ukraine in the near‐term, noting State/F’s preference to issue the guarantee as late as possible to allow more clarity on the budget context and Embassy Kyiv and Treasury’s assessment that Ukraine needs the guarantee by end‐2015,” she also said.
The task force identified some deliverables to be ironed out in the weeks before the loan guarantee, including strengthening procurement and other policies inside Shokin’s office.
“State (including via consultation with State/INL) and DOJ will explore options to further strengthen the PGO CP and submit a revised proposal (State and DOJ by October 6),” Segal-Knowles wrote.
In addition to urging the billion dollar loan guarantee be approved, the task force memo made no suggestion to fire Shokin or list any failures to pursue corruption.
By early November 2015, the task force had crafted a draft agreement for the loan guarantee. In a document titled “Third U.S. Loan Guarantee: Proposed Conditions Precedent,” officials laid out what Shokin’s office had agreed to do and made made no demand or even suggestion that the prosecutor be fired.
“Ukraine shall provide to USAID a copy of the comprehensive regulation, adopted by the Prosecutor General, which ensures the independent operations of the Office of Inspector General (IG) of the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO),” the memo explained. “The regulation shall clearly define the PGO IG’s jurisdiction, powers, and authority, to enable it to perform its functions in a manner that is effective and credible, and that increases the accountability of the PGO to the public. The regulation shall be endorsed by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
A month later, Joe Biden appeared to be synced with the task force recommendations.
In a call to Poroshenko on Nov. 5, 2015, Obama’s vice president delivered the message that Ukraine was about to get the massive new loan guarantee, while cheering on more reforms in Shokin’s office and the country’s elections, according to a State Department memo summarizing the phone conversation.
“Vice President Joe Biden spoke today with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about implementation of the Minsk agreements, economic reforms, and anti-corruption initiatives,” the department’s “readout” of the call recounted. “The Vice President congratulated President Poroshenko on the conduct of Ukraine’s local elections, which represent another milestone in the country’s democratic development.
“Regarding economic reforms, the Vice President reiterated the U.S. willingness to provide a third $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine contingent on continued Ukrainian progress to investigate and prosecute corruption and ensure that Ukraine’s tax reform is consistent with its IMF program,” the memo stated.
In the weeks that ensued, State and Justice officials proceeded with their plan laid out in the October memo, even inviting the senior leadership of Shokin’s office to come to Washington in January 2016 for further collaboration.
When those prosecutors arrived in Washington, according to the State Department memos, word leaked out that Biden had in December 2015 changed the U.S. message. The U.S. embassy in Kyiv reported the leak in the Ukrainian press, prompting a new thread among the IPC task force members that once again affirmed that they were “super impressed” with Shokin’s team.
“According to Dzerkalo Tyzhnya news website, ‘the U.S. State Department has made it clear to the Ukrainian authorities that it links the provision of a one billion dollar loan guarantee to Ukraine to the dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin,” the Kyiv embassy wrote members of the IPC task force.
“Buckle in,” Pyatt wrote in a cryptic response to the leak on Jan. 21, 2016.
Eric Ciarmella, a CIA official assigned to the Obama White House for Ukraine issues who would later emerge as the whistleblower whose allegations prompted Trump’s impeachment, seemed surprised by the leak.
“Yikes. I don’t recall this coming up in our meeting with them on Tuesday, although we did discuss the fact that the PGO IG condition has not yet been met,” Ciarmella wrote the IPC task force members. “I’ve been meaning to write to you about our meeting – we were super impressed with the group, and we had a two-hour discussion of their priorities and the obstacles they face.”
A few days earlier, the Obama White House circulated the latest conditions for the loan guarantee, again signaling the task force was prepared to provide the loan guarantee, though there were still some undelivered promises inside Shokin’s office.
“Here’s nearly the latest CP document. We’ve made some very minor tweaks since this version, which I will dig up and send to you tomorrow but wanted to get something to you tonight,” Segal-Knowles wrote State Department official Rachel Goldbrenner on Jan. 15.
The attached document was identical to the conditions memo crafted in November for Biden’s call with Poroshenko. Remarkably, it made no demand for Shokin’s removal from office.
In fact, none of the documents provided to Just the News or to Sen. Johnson’s exhaustive investigation in 2020 show any recommendation by the IPC to withhold the billion dollar loan guarantee or to demand Shokin’s firing. If they exist, they have not been provided to date.
Now, the story of how Joe Biden pivoted in late November 2015 to withhold the loan guarantee and forced Shokin’s firing is captured in two sets of emails that chronicle a tumultuous six weeks for the vice president’s office and for Hunter Biden’s relationship with Burisma.
They’ll be divulged in tomorrow’s second installment, including the Joe Biden talking points that provided the first documented mention of seeking Shokin’s dismissal. Those talking points, however, were not even shared with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
Here are a few articles/interviews with interesting information or analyses. I’m not advocating for any particular theory at this point. All I will say is that my first thoughts on hearing of Prigozhin’s death and the knee-jerk accusations of Putin’s responsibility was that he would not likely do this in the middle of the BRICS summit and would not likely do it in such a way as to have guaranteed collateral damage – yes, I think Putin would care about killing innocent bystanders for pragmatic reasons.- Natylie
BBC Monitoring
Russian investigators name suspect in Prigozhin plane bomb probe – ‘source’
Source: Telegram messaging service in Russian 1024 gmt 24 Aug 23
Russian investigators have named a suspect who they say may have placed a bomb on board Yevgeny Prigozhin’s jet before it crashed on 23 August, the Shot Telegram channel reported on 24 August.
Citing an unnamed source, Shot, which is thought to be close to Russia’s security services, said investigators were looking into the theory that a bomb was placed in the plane’s undercarriage well and had blown off a wing and tail fin, sending the jet into a terminal spin.
According to the VChK OGPU, a popular Telegram channel that monitors corruption and organised crime, a suspect has emerged in the case – Artyom Stepanov, one of Prigozhin’s pilots and former manager of the MNT Aero company which owned the Embraer Legacy jet that crashed. According to the channel, Stepanov had access to the plane.
Law enforcement agencies cannot find Stepanov, who went to Kamchatka in Russia’s far east prior to the incident, where he “disappeared”, the report said.
According to his brother, there has been no contact with him for three days. It is possible he has left Russia, VChK OGPU suggested.
Yesterday I was one of a half dozen Russia and international affairs experts who were interviewed in live broadcasts of WION Indian television as part of the station’s extensive coverage of the death in a plane crash of Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin. Many of those interviews have been posted on the internet. Perhaps mine will appear shortly and then I will attach the link below.
My point in writing now is to call attention to the line of reasoning that guided the WION reportage on Prigozhin, namely the assumption that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the assassination of Prigozhin. This follows from the logic (?) expressed briefly by U.S. President Joe Biden when he was asked by reporters for his response to the demise of Prigozhin. Said Joe, “There is not much that goes on in Russia without the involvement of Vladimir Putin.” It also follows from the logic of the WION news presenter that all those who have crossed Putin have come to miserable ends.
In this assumption of Putin’s responsibility for the assassination, WION was entirely in line with the overwhelming majority of mainstream media outlets in the West. Tabloids in the U.K., in Germany and elsewhere have carried lurid front page headlines pinning the murder on Putin.
Meanwhile, Russian media have a very different story to tell. The investigation which Russian criminal justice authorities have opened in the case is being taken seriously. The expressions of condolences offered by Putin to the families of those who died on the plane are taken as sincere. And as I saw on the Vladimir Solovyov talk show two days ago, the accusatory finger is being directed at the West, meaning in fact the United States, which is assumed to have plotted the assassination and carried it out either directly or via proxies.
So who is right about the authors of the assassination?
The Roman principle of cui bono to guide investigators is not particularly helpful in the Prigozhin case. The man was a swashbuckling self-promoter who made enemies wherever he operated. He publicly denounced Russia’s army leadership and held it up to ridicule. His mutiny two months ago and march on Moscow was not a parade: it cost the lives of 13 Russian servicemen whose planes and helicopters Prigozhin’s troops shot down. Whatever the disposition of the Russian President, these facts would ensure the emergence of Russian patriots set on eliminating the Wagner chief on their own initiative and to settle their personal scores with him.
And what about the enemies Prigozhin made abroad? He amassed a vast fortune in the Wagner Group operations in Africa, where he displaced the French presence in Mali, to the chagrin of the old colonial masters in Paris, and now he was expected to profit from the eviction of the French from Niger, and the expulsion possibly of the Americans as well. Remember that the United States has invested half a billion dollars in military installations and training in Niger, which may now be overturned at any moment by the anti-colonial new masters of the country.
To these considerations, I add here what I said on air to the WION interview host in answer to his listing the many Opposition figures in Russia who have come to nasty ends, including of course the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the politician Boris Nemtsov, the former FSB operative Alexander Litvinenko and more. Firstly, it is simplistic to think that one man, Vladimir Putin, is in full control of everything happening in a country of 145 million inhabitants who have their own interests, grudges, ambitions, etc. Secondly, the list of “victims” of Putin’s imagined revenge for crossing him does not take into account the fate of the many highly visible and active Putin-haters whom he has not touched in any way, because of the word of honor he gave to Boris Yeltsin when he was named as successor not to do any harm to the Yeltsin entourage. By way of example, I can name Yeltsin’s widow Naina and the viciously anti-Putin Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, which she heads. Then there are the viciously anti-Putin daughter of former Petersburg mayor Sobchak and Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmila Narusova; both have been accused of criminal activities for which they should properly be serving prison terms, but neither has suffered in any way thanks to Putin’s protection. There are many other conspicuous wreckers, like the now self-exiled Anatoly Chubais, who were spared only thanks to Putin’s honoring his promises to his former boss. Why would Vladimir Putin now violate the pledge he gave to Belarus President Lukashenko not to touch Prigozhin when they concluded a peace deal to end the mutiny?
Then again, the list of “victims” of Putin’s alleged vengeful ways given by the WION host also demands to be challenged. I think in particular of the “victim,” oligarch Boris Berezovsky who was found hanged in his London mansion some years ago. The Western press pointed and points to Putin as ordering the “suicide.” However, it is far more likely that the crime was committed by MI6 since Berezovsky was known to be negotiating a safe return to Russia with the FSB when he was “suicided.”
I conclude with mention of one detail that has been carried by Western media without exploring what it means beyond the face value they give it: namely the fact that the only source so far for the explanation of how Prigozhin’s plane went down is…U.S. intelligence agencies in anonymous disclosures to the press. They tell us that the plane was not shot down by ground to air missiles and that very likely it was destroyed by a bomb on board or other sabotage. Curiously, no one has bothered to ask how U.S. intelligence would know this if it were not directly involved in plotting the assassination.
[Viewing footage of the plane crash makes it appear that a bomb or other sabotage being responsible is a very reasonable initial assessment given the breakup of the plane and the lack of any of the telltale signs that would accompany a missile attack. This is just a common sense observation and does not require one to have been involved in the attack. – Natylie]
