From [TBC] To The Polar Lands - Rolling Russia / "Near Abroad" News Thread

Poroshenko had Saakashvili arrested today. Misha’s supporters busted him out of the police van and whisked him off. No border can stop him, no jail can hold him.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gSdb2c0Eve4

Well, a prison probably could but not a two-door Ford transit, certainly.

In another bizarre twist, Jane Collins of UKIP - an MEP last seen getting rinsed for £358k in libel damages she claims not to be able to pay (having defamed a number of people wrt the Rochdale grooming saga) - has just turned up in Kyiv to defend Misha.

http://www.eurointegration.com.ua/news/2017/12/5/7074665/

Saakashvili is safely in jail, having been arrested by armed police at his home, and is now on hunger strike.

The Prosecutor General, Yuri Lutsenko, has said the Ukrainian authorities have taped evidence of him accepting money from ‘criminal gangs linked to Yanukovich’, which Misha says has been fabricated.

The nature of Ukrainian domestic politics means there is a reasonable chance it is true - but ‘criminal gangs’ and ‘linked to Yanukovich’ have extremely elastic meanings. Odessa, where he was governor, has a large and sophisticated organised crime network linked to the ports and Saakashvili was often rumoured to be working with them.

However, the shakeup of oligarchs, many linked to crime networks, has left former Yanukovich associates like Rinat Akhmetov closely allied with either Poroshenko or his rival Yatseniuk.

Nobody is innocent and picking on Saakashvili, who has about 3% support for his party nationally, looks like weakness. idk how much trouble his anti-corruption campaign was likely to cause but a high-profile ‘political prisoner’ with good ties to the US is the last thing a leader still needing massive financial and political support from the international community should be looking to get.

This is going on in the background:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/12/07/its-time-for-the-west-to-get-tough-on-ukraine/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.71994705e8db&__twitter_impression=true

"He is a super president and a super leader" - New "SuperPutin" exhibition opens in Moscow with the Russian leader portrayed in various heroic roles; from riding a bear to firing missiles in the colours of the Russian flag pic.twitter.com/LxQ9WZOxfD

— AFP news agency (@AFP) December 10, 2017

it is pretty awesome living in the year 250 BC

For context, this ‘museum’ seems to be a rental space in an arts complex on the outskirts of town and opened in November. The ticket price (higher than the Pushkin and the Tretyakov put together) suggests they don’t expect many visitors and it is more of a publicity stunt on the part of the gallerist or, like most of the Putin tat in Moscow, aimed at the irony tourism market, than much else.

fwiw, the Kremlin seems a bit rattled this election cycle - not really because there is an expectation people will rush out to vote for Zhirinovsky, Sobchak or (given the chance) Navalny but because there is a very strong chance of a low turnout. Some of the Navalny messaging around corruption has hurt Medvedev and, by association, the whole Putin cadre and there isn’t really a sense of much natural excitement about the prospect of an extended Putin run. His approval numbers will stay high unless something extraordinary happens but the percentage of people going out to vote will probably diminish. There are plans to basically turn the day of the election into a big national holiday with civic events and funfairs or w/e to try to get people out of the house.

Oddly, the LDPR seems to have spent a hell of a lot of money on advertising recently. They’re everywhere. I’m not sure where they get the cash from. One theory might be that they are being boosted to give people the impression that they need to go out and vote for United Russia to stop them but idk.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/12/21/russian-lawmakers-want-to-make-it-possible-to-blacklist-individual-people-literally-anybody-with-internet-access-as-foreign-agent-mass-media-outlets

Good piece on how, as everyone predicted, elements within the Duma want to use the Foreign Agent designation of RT in the US to justify a wave of new regulations against everyone from major news outlets to individual bloggers who take money from abroad.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/20/politics/us-ukraine-weapons-export/index.html

The US has lifted Obama’s ban on selling small arms to Ukraine. This is not particularly huge in itself (Ukraine is a net exporter of small arms) but is seen as a potential precursor to what they are really after, which is a bunch of free anti-tank missiles.

https://www.ft.com/content/4bc2f436-e5d9-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec

The English High Court has just frozen the assets of one of Ukraine’s biggest oligarch / power-broker / media magnates - Ihor Kolomoisky - after he was accused of stealing $2bn from a bank he owned. He flits between different factions, and has his own political party, but is currently aligned with Poroshenko’s main rival Yatsenyuk iirc.

He was caught meeting with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General (or rather the PG was caught meeting with him) in Amsterdam last week - something they both tried to pass off as two tourists bumping into each other. It’s strongly suspected the PG is helping him evade domestic charges related to the (now state owned) bank.

something they both tried to pass off as two tourists bumping into each other

Lol this feels like at some point it will be Trump's endgame if his frequent (secret) meetings with Russians come up

It's a bit of a classic is that one!

BREAKING: US officials: Trump administration approves plan to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles.

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 23, 2017

This is not good.

Pee-tape in 3, 2, 1...

They’ve also banned Kadyrov from Instagram under the terms of the new sanctions, perhaps the most damaging blow yet.

Yeah, no more pee-tape screenshots. Those devious bastards!

Russian submarines are prowling around vital undersea cables. It’s making NATO nervous.

Feel like I've read this ^^ story multiple times since 2014. Has anything changed this year?

The Soviets/Russians would be remiss to not already have means of severing critical undersea cables in the case of conflict. There are plenty of places, particularly southwest of Ireland, where the seabed is shallow enough to permit emplacement of explosives in the muck below the cables, without assistance. They could also just be splicing into the cables, as the U.S. has long done in Russian Baltic/White Sea/Caspian Sea cables.

Starting in 90s, NSA used underwater drones, delivered by submarine, to tap undersea cables. https://t.co/mkqjW4pT8Q pic.twitter.com/ASfgshBEuX

— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) March 31, 2016

^ without assistance from surface ships

The chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has claimed that banning Kadyrov from Instagram violates international law and has demanded a symmetrical response. All the Chechen parliament have deleted their accounts in solidarity. It’s popping off.

Seems like every time I'm glancing at non-collusion related russian news, it's Navalny getting arrested again.

Leonid Ragozin at Bloomberg is worth following for sympathetic coverage of Navalny:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-26/navalny-s-followers-see-putin-s-weakness-in-russia-s-heartland

Though, as suggested elsewhere, disaffection is more likely to lead to people not engaging with politics / bothering to vote than a groundswell of opinion in favour of Navalny.

The US has just published a list of ‘Kremlin-linked oligarchs’ ahead of potential future individual sanctions and they have literally just copied and pasted from a Forbes article about the 96 richest people people in Russia. This was supposed to have taken the State Department six months:

So the 96 “oligarch” names on the US Treasury list correspond EXACTLY to the 96 billionaires on this Forbes list of the Russian rich. https://t.co/VtjUJHXpro

— Tom Parfitt (@parfitt_tom) January 30, 2018

The list includes at least two people who have claimed their businesses have been expropriated by the state.

Vladimir Putin earned 38.5 million rubles (roughly $673,000) between 2011 and 2016, according to information publicly released by the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation on Tuesday, giving the Russian president an average yearly salary of about $112,000.

The president also listed a number of assets on his forms, including 13 bank accounts with a combined balance of 13.8 million rubles ($241,000), a roughly 800-square-foot apartment in St. Petersburg, 230 shares in Bank Saint Petersburg and two Soviet-made sports cars — Volgas made in 1960 and 1965 — and a 2009 Lada 4x4.

Putin was required to give details of his income and assets as part of his registration for the upcoming presidential election, due to be held March 18. Putin completed his registration Tuesday, according to reports in Russian state media.

lol

Wow this was sloppy wetwork:

Britain Threatens Retaliation Against Kremlin After Russian Spy Collapse: Fears of an assassination attempt on ex Russian agent Sergei Skripal with a toxic substance deepened when it emerged that emergency workers were hospitalized after treating him.

There's a suggestion that more details, including the nature of the substance they encountered, are going to be released this afternoon. There were rumours in the press it was Fentanyl - though nothing official yet.

It's an odd one if it was a state-backed assassination attempt - i think it would be the first time Russia had tried to knock off anyone involved in a spy exchange. There'd be little point in good-faith trading of spies if they're just going to get killed.

The witness statement is very British:

“There was some blonde bird laying on an old man's shoulder doing this hand thing in the air,”

How would Fentanyl have put first responders in the hospital? Unless those were bogus reports. Which I could easily believe.

They could be exaggerated reports but you can apparently turn something very similar to Fentanyl into an aerosol / gas.

Is fentanyl soluble in dimethyl sulfoxide? One can get just about anything through the skin in DMSO solution, indeed, you can rub it on your skin and taste the garlicy sulfur note in a few seconds. In the 60s there were plans to wipe doorknobs at Republican conventions with LSD/DMSO solutions, for laffs.

So, a passerby walks close to Skripal and daughter with a pump bottle, sprays them in their faces, and first responders unaware that DMSO will also slip right through latex gloves also get a dose.

Or they didn't put on gloves, given no blood was visible.

3-Methylfentanyl was also reported by media as the identity of the anaesthetic "gas" Kolokol-1 delivered as an aerosol during the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002

More likely:

In 2012, a team of researchers at the British chemical and biological defense laboratories at Porton Down found carfentanil and remifentanil in clothing from two British survivors of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and in the urine from a third survivor

OT aside, yikes!:

In June, 2016 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized one kilogram of carfentanil shipped from China in a box labeled "printer accessories". According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the shipment contained 50 million lethal doses of the drug, more than enough to wipe out the entire population of the country, in containers labeled as toner cartridges for Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers.

A couple of journalists are saying police have confirmed it is a nerve agent and that a police officer is also in a serious condition.

Tabloid press are going to have a field day with a British bobby being poisoned by the dastardly Russkies.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said foreign media had used the incident as part of an anti-Russian campaign.

"It's a traditional campaign. The tradition is to make things up. We can only see it as a provocation," she said.

Just another enemy of the Russian state poisoned in England, this time a nerve agent. nbd.

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.

This is part of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’.

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down; our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so; Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations; the Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYGzAysX4AEZMLH.jpg

Atropine auto-injectors are useless against this.

The UK government has apparently given Russia a deadline of midnight tonight to respond meaningfully to the situation - which seems fair enough. They've issued nothing but flat denials so far.

Most of the pundits i follow are still struggling with the 'why?' though. There doesn't seem to be an obvious logic to offing an old spy in such an outrageous and public way - guaranteed to strengthen sanctions and with a narrow window for plausible deniability - a few days before the election. Most people think this is more likely to suppress the vote and bring out the protest vote than drive people to the polls.

Even if it wasn't intended to go down the way it went, a former Russian spy dying suddenly with unusual symptoms a ten minute drive from Europe's largest stockpile of chemical and biological weapons is always going to get a full investigation.

The main theories seem to be the Kremlin sending a message to its spy network and hang the consequences, some kind of steer from the top but mid-level FSB people running with a completely stupid plan off their own bat or, potentially most worrying, hardline militarist / nationalist factions within the Russian security services going rogue in order to undermine Putin and force a confrontation. I don't know how any of that ranks in terms of credibility.

If you listened to BBC propaganda you might think Putin had absolute control over the FSB.

that bbc 2 Putin doc was abysmal, really waiting with bated breath to hear William Hague's next earth shattering insights on the intrigues within the Russian Federation, not.

xp the hardliner theory is indeed worrying, but why bother forcing a confrontation with the UK? I suppose because it's currently diplomatically isolated as a result of Brexit and Trump's Russian ambivalence?

I think the assumption is that an attack in / on the UK is going to trigger a response from the EU, NATO and the US. The UK is also the base of a large proportion of Putin's closest allies - there's already talk of targeted reprisals against Abramovich, etc. Squeezing the people who keep Russia tied to Europe, and Europe tied to Russia, could be an effective way to cause a more definitive rift. Again, idk how credible this is.

gotcha, thx.

"there's already talk of targeted reprisals against Abramovich"

an assassin could be concealing deadly nerve agents within his hair-weave, security will have to be stepped up.

Anything that harms Chelsea FC is obviously a good thing.

Margarita Simonyan has just said it is “Хайли лайкли” that OFCOM will pull RT’s license (backed up by hints from OFCOM itself) - which will mean the reciprocal removal of BBC Russia’s ability to operate, another blow to independent reporting in the country.

well that's a result for putin innit

Yep, it’s the one area in which tit for tat sanctions / closures actively work in his favour.

The idea of BBC Russia being a bastion of quality reportage and impartiality seems quite odd from a UK perspective.