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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In FTR #967, we noted the Ukrainian fascist affiliation of Andrei Artemenko, a Ukrainian member of Parliament who worked with CIA and FBI-connected Trump business associate Felix Sater. Alleged by our media and government to have signified “Russian influence” on the Trump administration, this Sater/Artemenko gambit was actually an ANTI-Russian conspiracy.
In this program, we highlight the profound extent to which the “evidence” in the Russia-Gate “investigation” tracks back to the very same OUN/B successor organizations we have covered in so many of our previous programs:
- A story noting the probable Dnipropetrovsk origin of the missile technology apparently facilitating North Korea’s guided missile technology documented the political affiliation of Igor Kolomoisky [Kolomoiskoy], governor of the “Dnipro” district: ” . . . . So, among the Kolomoisky-backed militias was the Azov battalion whose members marched with Swastikas and other Nazi insignias. . . . . . . . In response to the reports of possible Ukrainian collusion in North Korea’s missile program, Oleksandr Turchynov, secretary of the Ukrainian national security and defense council, issued a bizarre denial suggesting that The New York Times and U.S. intelligence agencies were pawns of Russia. . . . Press reports about Turchynov’s statement left out two salient facts: that as the interim President following the February 2014 coup, Turchynov ordered Right Sektor militants to begin the bloody siege of rebel-held Sloviansk, a key escalation in the conflict, and that Turchynov was the one who appointed Kolomoisky to be the ruler of Dnipropetrovsk.”
- The journalistic viewpoint on a Ukrainian hacker allegedly used by “Russian hackers” against the U.S. comes from Anton Gerashchenko, part of the same milieu as Pravy Sektor, Azov, etc. Gerashchenko is, in fact, an apologist for Azov, as discussed in FTR #‘s 803, 804, 808, 818: ” . . . . Security experts were initially left scratching their heads when the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 29 released technical evidence of Russian hacking that seemed to point not to Russia, but rather to Ukraine. . . A member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in Russian hacking. . . . It is not clear whether the specific malware the programmer created was used to hack the D.N.C. servers. . . .”
- Reading between the lines, an otherwise characteristically propagandized New York Times article encapsulated critically important information: “. . . . While still politically influenced, Ukrainian law enforcement is no longer a swamp of incompetence and corruption. It has been able to monitor Mr. Manafort’s former business associates and turn up evidence of Russian hacking in the 2016 United States election, in part owing to American support. . . .”
- Exemplifying the Ukrainian fascists at the epicenter of “Russia-Gate” are a group of Ukrainian hackers, working in tandem with fascist politicians like the aforementioned Anton Gerashchenko. The hacker/Ukrainian fascist link spawned the “PropOrNot” list of “Russian/Kremlin/Putin” dupes in the U.S. media: This list was compiled by the Ukrainian intelligence service, interior ministry and–ahem–hackers: “. . . . One of the more frightening policies enacted by the current oligarch-nationalist regime in Kiev is an online blacklist [42] of journalists accused of collaborating with pro-Russian ‘terrorists.’ [43] The website, ‘Myrotvorets’ [43] or ‘Peacemaker’—was set up by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultranationalist ideologies as Parubiy and the newly-appointed neo-Nazi chief of the National Police. . . . The website is designed to frighten and muzzle journalists from reporting anything but the pro-nationalist party line, and it has the backing of government officials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s successor to the KGB), the powerful Interior Minister Avakov and his notorious far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko. Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. . . .”
- A Ukrainian activist named Alexandra Chalupa has been instrumental in distributing the “Russia did it” disinformation to Hillary Clinton and influencing the progress of the disinformation in the media. ” . . . . One of the key media sources [46] who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group ‘US United With Ukraine Coalition’ [47], which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests. . . . In one leaked DNC email [50] earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited ‘to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.’ In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source [46] ‘proving’ that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers. . . .”
- Alleged “Russian agent” Paul Manafort–identified in FTR #919 as a probable “advance man” for regimes targeted for destabilization–may well have been the person who recommended to his “client” Yanukovich to fire on the Maidan demonstrators. It was that gunfire that signalled the end of Yanukovich’s government. This reinforces Mr. Emory’s take on Manafort. ” . . . . The lawyer’s demands for explanation spring from the hacking earlier this year of the iPhone of Mr Manafort’s daughter, [since confirmed as genuine, at least in part–D.E.] Andrea, with around 300,000 messages published in the dark web. One of the texts sent to her sister Jessica said: ‘Don’t fool yourself. That money we have is blood money.’ It continued ‘You know he has killed people in Ukraine? Knowingly, as a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine. Remember when there were all those deaths taking place. A while back. About a year ago. Revolts and what not. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that, to send those people get them slaughtered.’ . . . .”
- Reinforcing the hypothesis that the Maidan shootings were a provocation is the disclosure by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor that the rifles allegedly used to fire on the Maidan demonstrators were recovered by an alleged Yanukovich operative and leader of the snipers who was one of the demonstrators on the Maidan! “ . . . Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko says that the man who helped the so-called “black hundred” of police task force Berkut, who had been shooting at protesters during the Revolution of Dignity, flee Kyiv and deliberately drowned their weapons to conceal evidence, was himself one of the participants of the Maidan protests. ‘With the help of military counterintelligence, we have found weapons of the ‘black hundred,’ including a sniper rifle, which the entire country saw on footage showing the shooting at the protesters from outside the October Palace,” he told the 112 Ukraine TV channel. . . . ‘We found it with a large number of automatic rifles on the bottom of one of Kiev’s lakes. They were cut and drowned in one batch by a single group, whose leader is one of the targets of our investigation. Unfortunately, this man who, according to our version, upon the orders of [former Interior Minister Vitaliy] Zakharchenko helped the ‘black hundred’ flee Kyiv, destroyed and drowned their weapons, he, himself, was with us on the Maidan,’ Lutsenko said. . . . ”
- The sniper activity in the Maidan must be weighed against the fact that Nazi-linked elements from the Azov milieu were serving as snipers in Kiev at the time. Were they connected to the shootings of demonstrators?
- The supposed “evidence” of Russian hacking in the U.S. election comes from CrowdStrike, whose co-founder and chief technology officer–Dmitry Alperovitch–is deeply tied to the NATO/OUN/B milieu installed in power in Ukraine: ” . . . . Dmitri Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. The connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is relevant given that the Atlantic Council—which is is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk—has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with Russia. As I pointed out in the pages of The Nation in November, the Atlantic Council has spent the past several years producing some of the most virulent specimens of the new Cold War propaganda. . . .”
Program Highlights Include:
- Information supplementing the discussion from FTR #967 concerning attempts by the OUN/B successor organizations to oust Poroshenko.
- Efforts by Yulia Tymoshenko to pass information about Poroshenko to U.S. authorities.
- The role of former Ukrainian intelligence chief, Pravy Sektor intimate Valentyn Nalyvaichenko in Tymoshenko’s efforts.
- The role of Nalyvaichenko in providing dirt on Poroshenko to Artemenko
- The role of Atlantic Council financier Viktor Pinchuk in advancing “peace plans” being attributed to “Russia/Putin/the Kremlin/dupes of same.”
1. Robert Parry highlights a critical feature of the transfer of Ukrainian ICBM technology to North Korea. Dnipropetrovsk, where a financially distressed missile factory resides, had Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky as governor, beginning in 2014 just after the Maidan revolution.
Kolomoisky is a strong backer of neo-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian militia units that are prominent in the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine–the Azov battalion in particular.
As Parry also notes below, it was Kolomoisky’s operation in Dnipro that has come under suspicion for a possible role in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. That may well have been a rogue Ukrainian military operation authored by neo-Nazi militias operating in that area–they had access to the anti-aircraft missile technology used to down the aircraft.
“A Ukraine Link to North Korea’s Missiles?” by Robert Parry; Consortium News; 08/15/2017
U.S. intelligence analysts reportedly have traced North Korea’s leap forward in creating an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking U.S. territory to a decaying Ukrainian rocket-engine factory whose alleged role could lift the cover off other suppressed mysteries related to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.
Because the 2014 coup – overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych – was partly orchestrated by the U.S. government’s influential neoconservatives and warmly embraced by the West’s mainstream media, many of the ugly features of the Kiev regime have been downplayed or ignored, including the fact that corrupt oligarch Igor Kolomoisky was put in charge of the area where the implicated factory was located.
As the region’s governor, the thuggish Kolomoisky founded armed militias of Ukrainian extremists, including neo-Nazis, who spearheaded the violence against ethnic Russians in eastern provinces, which had voted heavily for Yanukovych and tried to resist his violent overthrow.
Kolomoisky, who has triple citizenship from Ukraine, Cyprus and Israel, was eventually ousted as governor of Dnipropetrovsk (now called Dnipro) on March 25, 2015, after a showdown with Ukraine’s current President Petro Poroshenko over control of the state-owned energy company, but by then Kolomoisky’s team had put its corrupt mark on the region.
At the time of the Kolomoisky-Poroshenko showdown, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, chief of the State Security Service, accused Dnipropetrovsk officials of financing armed gangs and threatening investigators, Bloomberg News reported, while noting that Ukraine had sunk to 142nd place out of 175 countries in Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index, the worst in Europe.
Even earlier in Kolomoisky’s brutal reign, Dnipropetrovsk had become the center for the violent intrigue that has plagued Ukraine for the past several years, including the dispatch of neo-Nazi militias to kill ethnic Russians who then turned to Russia for support.
Tolerating Nazis
Yet, protected by the waves of anti-Russian propaganda sweeping across the West, Kolomoisky’s crowd saw few reasons for restraint. So, among the Kolomoisky-backed militias was the Azov battalion whose members marched with Swastikas and other Nazi insignias.
Ironically, the same Western media which heartily has condemned neo-Nazi and white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, adopted a much more tolerant attitude toward Ukraine’s neo-Nazism even as those militants murdered scores of ethnic Russians in Odessa in May 2014 and attacked ethnic Russian communities in the east where thousands more died.
When it came to Ukraine, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets were so dedicated to their anti-Russian propaganda that they veered between minimizing the significance of the neo-Nazi militias and treating them as bulwarks of Western civilization.
For instance, on Feb. 11, 2015, the Times published a long article by Rick Lyman that presented the situation in the port city of Mariupol as if the advance by ethnic Russian rebels amounted to the arrival of barbarians at the gate while the inhabitants were being bravely defended by the forces of civilization. But then the article cited the key role in that defense played by the Azov battalion.
Though the article provided much color and detail and quoted an Azov leader prominently, it left out the fact that the Azov battalion was composed of neo-Nazis.
This inconvenient truth that neo-Nazis were central to Ukraine’s “self-defense forces” would have disrupted the desired propaganda message about “Russian aggression.” After all, wouldn’t many Americans and Europeans understand why Russia, which suffered some 27 million dead in World War II, might be sensitive to neo-Nazis killing ethnic Russians on Russia’s border?
So, in Lyman’s article, the Times ignored Azov’s well-known neo-Nazism and referred to it simply as a “volunteer unit.”
In other cases, the Times casually brushed past the key role of fascist militants. In July 2015, the Times published a curiously upbeat story about the good news that Islamic militants had joined with far-right and neo-Nazi battalions to kill ethnic Russian rebels.
The article by Andrew E. Kramer reported that there were three Islamic battalions “deployed to the hottest zones,” such as around Mariupol. One of the battalions was headed by a former Chechen warlord who went by the name “Muslim,” Kramer wrote, adding:
“The Chechen commands the Sheikh Mansur group, named for an 18th-century Chechen resistance figure. It is subordinate to the nationalist Right Sector, a Ukrainian militia. Right Sector formed during last year’s street protests in Kiev from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups like White Hammer and the Trident of Stepan Bandera.
“Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi, using the Wolf’s Hook’ symbol associated with the [Nazi] SS. Without addressing the issue of the Nazi symbol, the Chechen said he got along well with the nationalists because, like him, they loved their homeland and hated the Russians.”
Rockets for North Korea
The Times encountered another discomforting reality on Monday when correspondents William J. Broad and David E. Sanger described U.S. intelligence assessments pointing to North Korea’s likely source of its new and more powerful rocket engines as a Ukrainian factory in Dnipro.
Of course, the Times bent over backward to suggest that the blame might still fall on Russia even though Dnipro is a stronghold of some of Ukraine’s most militantly anti-Russian politicians and although U.S. intelligence analysts have centered their suspicions on a Ukrainian-government-owned factory there, known as Yuzhmash.
So, it would seem clear that corrupt Ukrainian officials, possibly in cahoots with financially pressed executives or employees of Yuzhmash, are the likeliest suspects in the smuggling of these rocket engines to North Korea.
Even the Times couldn’t dodge that reality, saying: “Government investigators and experts have focused their inquiries on a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine.” But the Times added that Dnipro is “on the edge of the territory where Russia is fighting a low-level war to break off part of Ukraine” – to suggest that the Russians somehow might have snuck into the factory, stolen the engines and smuggled them to North Korea.
But the Times also cited the view of missile expert Michael Elleman, who addressed North Korea’s sudden access to more powerful engines in a study issued this week by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“It’s likely that these engines came from Ukraine — probably illicitly,” [missile expert Michael Elleman said in an interview with the Times. “The big question is how many they have and whether the Ukrainians are helping them now. I’m very worried.” . . . .
. . . . Yet, while the Ukraine crisis may have reduced living standards for average Ukrainians, it was an important catalyst in the creation of the New Cold War between Washington and Moscow, which offers lucrative opportunities for U.S. military contractors and their many think-tank apologists despite increasing the risk of nuclear war for the rest of us. . . . .
The MH-17 Case, Kolomoisky’s operation in Dnipro also has come under suspicion for a possible role in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. According to a source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts, Dnipro was the center of a plot to use a powerful anti-aircraft missile to shoot down Putin’s official plane on a return flight from South America, but instead – after Putin’s plane took a more northerly route – the missile brought down MH-17, killing all 298 people aboard.
For reasons that have still not been explained, the Obama administration suppressed U.S. intelligence reports on the MH-17 tragedy and instead joined in pinning the shoot-down on ethnic Russian rebels and, by implication, Putin and his government.
In the West, the MH-17 shoot-down became a cause celebre, generating a powerful propaganda campaign to demonize Putin and Russia – and push Europe into joining sanctions against Moscow. Few people dared question Russia alleged guilt even though the Russia-did-it arguments were full of holes. [See here and here.] . . . .
. . . . In response to the reports of possible Ukrainian collusion in North Korea’s missile program, Oleksandr Turchynov, secretary of the Ukrainian national security and defense council, issued a bizarre denial suggesting that The New York Times and U.S. intelligence agencies were pawns of Russia.
“This information [about North Korea possibly obtaining rocket engines from Ukraine] is not based on any grounds, provocative by its content, and most likely provoked by Russian secret services to cover their own crimes,” Turchynov said.
Press reports about Turchynov’s statement left out two salient facts: that as the interim President following the February 2014 coup, Turchynov ordered Right Sektor militants to begin the bloody siege of rebel-held Sloviansk, a key escalation in the conflict, and that Turchynov was the one who appointed Kolomoisky to be the ruler of Dnipropetrovsk.
2. We are being told that a Ukrainian hacker, nicknamed “The Profexer” was the creator of the malware allegedly used in the high-profile hacks.
The assertion that the Profexer was paid by Russian hackers to write custom malware comes from Anton Gerashchenko, a far-right member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services and an open apologist for the Azov Battalion.
And according to Mr. Gerashchenko, the interaction the Prefexor had with the ‘Russian hackers’ was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose.
As the article also notes, however, “It is not clear whether the specific malware the programmer created was used to hack the D.N.C. servers, but it was identified in other Russian hacking efforts in the United States.”
The central point here involves Profexer’s claims to have written software for the Russian hackers who “hacked” the DNC.
Aside from the fact that the DNC may not have been “hacked” at all, the P.A.S. web shell tool the Profexer wrote that was cited in the “Grizzly Steppe” report was an outdated version of P.A.S. web shell.
Unless there’s more information yet to come along this line of inquiry, it appears that the primary criminal activity that the Profexer witnessed was his own quasi-crime of creating “customized malware” for an anonymous group that may or may not have been used in the DNC hacks. Based on this compelling evidence it appears we can narrow the culprits down to…pretty much any hacker. Huzzah!
It’s clear that the P.A.S. web shell malware that was used in the DNC hacks wasn’t customized. Because it was already an outdated version of P.A.S. web shell.
The article also notes that the Ukrainian government has handed over to the FBI server images of the Ukrainian Election Commission server that was hacked in 2014 during a high profile hack suspected to be the work of Russian government agents.
That hack created material touting Dmitry Yarosh–the head of Pravy Sektor (“Right Sector”) as the victor in the Ukrainian elections of 2014.
The hacker, known only by his online alias “Profexer,” kept a low profile.He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the dark web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.
Profexer’s posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in Russian hacking in the United States. . . . .
But while Profexer’s online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.
“I don’t know what will happen,” he wrote in one of his last messages posted on a restricted-access website before going to the police. “It won’t be pleasant. But I’m still alive.”
It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the election hacking and the heated debate it has stirred.The Ukrainian police declined to divulge the man’s name or other details, other than that he is living in Ukraine and has not been arrested.
There is no evidence that Profexer worked, at least knowingly, for Russia’s intelligence services, but his malware apparently did. . . .
. . . . “There is not now and never has been a single piece of technical evidence produced that connects the malware used in the D.N.C. attack to the G.R.U., F.S.B. or any agency of the Russian government,” said Jeffrey Carr, the author of a book on cyberwarfare. The G.R.U. is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the F.S.B. its federal security service. . . .
. . . . Security experts were initially left scratching their heads when the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 29 released technical evidence of Russian hacking that seemed to point not to Russia, but rather to Ukraine.
In this initial report, the department released only one sample of malware said to be an indicator of Russian state-sponsored hacking, though outside experts said a variety of malicious programs were used in Russian electoral hacking.
The sample pointed to a malware program, called the P.A.S. web shell, a hacking tool advertised on Russian-language dark web forums and used by cybercriminals throughout the former Soviet Union. The author, Profexer, is a well-regarded technical expert among hackers, spoken about with awe and respect in Kiev.
He had made it available to download, free, from a website that asked only for donations, ranging from $3 to $250. The real money was made by selling customized versions and by guiding his hacker clients in its effective use. It remains unclear how extensively he interacted with the Russian hacking team.
After the Department of Homeland Security identified his creation, he quickly shut down his website and posted on a closed forum for hackers, called Exploit, that “I’m not interested in excessive attention to me personally.”
Soon, a hint of panic appeared, and he posted a note saying that, six days on, he was still alive.
Another hacker, with the nickname Zloi Santa, or Bad Santa, suggested the Americans would certainly find him, and place him under arrest, perhaps during a layover at an airport.
“It could be, or it could not be, it depends only on politics,” Profexer responded. “If U.S. law enforcement wants to take me down, they will not wait for me in some country’s airport. Relations between our countries are so tight I would be arrested in my kitchen, at the first request.”
In fact, Serhiy Demediuk, chief of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, said in an interview that Profexer went to the authorities himself. As the cooperation began, Profexer went dark on hacker forums. He last posted online on Jan. 9. Mr. Demediuk said he had made the witness available to the F.B.I., which has posted a full-time cybersecurity expert in Kiev as one of four bureau agents stationed at the United States Embassy there. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
Profexer was not arrested because his activities fell in a legal gray zone, as an author but not a user of malware, the Ukrainian police say. But he did know the users, at least by their online handles. “He told us he didn’t create it to be used in the way it was,” Mr. Demediuk said.
A member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in Russian hacking.
Mr. Gerashchenko described the author only in broad strokes, to protect his safety, as a young man from a provincial Ukrainian city. He confirmed that the author turned himself in to the police and was cooperating as a witness in the D.N.C. investigation. . . .
. . . . It is not clear whether the specific malware the programmer created was used to hack the D.N.C. servers. . . .
. . . . Included in this sharing of information were copies of the server hard drives of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, which were targeted during a presidential election in May 2014. That the F.B.I. had obtained evidence of this earlier, Russian-linked electoral hack has not been previously reported.
Traces of the same malicious code, this time a program called Sofacy, were seen in the 2014 attack in Ukraine and later in the D.N.C. intrusion in the United States. . . .
. . . . . Hackers had loaded onto a Ukrainian election commission server a graphic mimicking the page for displaying results. This phony page showed a shocker of an outcome: an election win for a fiercely anti-Russian, ultraright candidate, Dmytro Yarosh. Mr. Yarosh in reality received less than 1 percent of the vote.
The false result would have played into a Russian propaganda narrative that Ukraine today is ruled by hard-right, even fascist, figures. . . .
. . . . A Ukrainian government researcher who studied the hack, Nikolai Koval, published his findings in a 2015 book, “Cyberwar in Perspective,” and identified the Sofacy malware on the server.
The mirror of the hard drive went to the F.B.I., which had this forensic sample when the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified the same malware two years later, on the D.N.C. servers.
. . . .Ukraine’s Cyber Police have also provided the F.B.I. with copies of server hard drives showing the possible origins of some phishing emails targeting the Democratic Party during the election. . . .
3. Note the Ukrainian intelligence services’ apparent role in the “investigation” into Russia-Gate. Noting the disappearance of an arrested Ukrainian hacker and quoting the aforementioned Oleksander Turchynov, a characteristically slanted New York Times article notes that: ” . . . . . . . . While still politically influenced, Ukrainian law enforcement is no longer a swamp of incompetence and corruption. It has been able to monitor Mr. Manafort’s former business associates and turn up evidence of Russian hacking in the 2016 United States election, in part owing to American support. . . . [The “evidence” comes from Ukrainian security services–D.E.]”
. . . . The arrest of Gennadi Kapkanov, 33, a Russian-born Ukrainian hacker, and the takedown of Avalanche, a vast network of computers he and his confederates were accused of hijacking through malware and turning into a global criminal enterprise, won a rare round of applause for Ukraine from its frequently dispirited Western backers.
By the following day, however, Mr. Kapkanov had disappeared.
A judge in a district court in Poltava turned down a prosecution request that he be held in preventive custody for 40 days, and ordered him set free. Mr. Kapkanov has not been seen since. . . .
. . . . “Why is there so much noise around Ukraine? Because Ukraine is the epicenter of the confrontation between the Western democratic world and authoritarian, totalitarian states,” Oleksandr Turchynov, the head of Ukraine’s national security and defense council, said in an interview. . . .
. . . . While still politically influenced, Ukrainian law enforcement is no longer a swamp of incompetence and corruption. It has been able to monitor Mr. Manafort’s former business associates and turn up evidence of Russian hacking in the 2016 United States election, in part owing to American support.
The C.I.A. tore out a Russian-provided cellphone surveillance system, and put in American-supplied computers, said Viktoria Gorbuz, a former head of liaison at the S.B.U.
Ms. Gorbuz’s department translated telephone intercepts from the new system and forwarded them to the Americans.
It is unclear whether any phone intercepts relevant to the election meddling investigation have gone to the American authorities. But a Ukrainian law enforcement official has given journalists partial phone records of former associates of Mr. Manafiort. . . .
4. A key element of analysis is an important article in The Nation by James Carden. This story points out that a number of cyber-security experts are skeptical of the official findings.
Furthermore the story points out that Crowdstrike is headed by Dmitri Alperovitch a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which is funded, in part, by the State Department, NATO, Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukrainian World Congress and Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk!
” . . . . Yet despite the scores of breathless media pieces that assert that Russia’s interference in the election is ‘case closed,‘might some skepticism be in order? Some cyber experts say ‘yes.’ . . . Cyber-security experts have also weighed in. The security editor at Ars Technica observed that ‘Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks,’ the government report ‘largely restates previous private sector claims without providing any support for their validity.’ Robert M. Lee of the cyber-security company Dragos noted that the report ‘reads like a poorly done vendor intelligence report stringing together various aspects of attribution without evidence.’ Cybersecurity consultant Jeffrey Carr noted that the report ‘merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company that is suspected of being Russian-made and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists.’ . . .”
“In this respect, it is worth noting that one of the commercial cybersecurity companies the government has relied on is Crowdstrike, which was one of the companies initially brought in by the DNC to investigate the alleged hacks.”
” . . . . Dmitri Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. . . . The connection between [Crowdstrike co-founder and chief technology officer Dmitri] Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is relevant given that the Atlantic Council—which is is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk—has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with Russia. As I pointed out in the pages of The Nation in November, the Atlantic Council has spent the past several years producing some of the most virulent specimens of the new Cold War propaganda. . . . ”
“Is Skepticism Treason?” by James Carden; The Nation; 1/3/2017.
. . . . In this respect, it is worth noting that one of the commercial cybersecurity companies the government has relied on is Crowdstrike, which was one of the companies initially brought in by the DNC to investigate the alleged hacks.
In late December, Crowdstrike released a largely debunked report claiming that the same Russian malware that was used to hack the DNC has been used by Russian intelligence to target Ukrainian artillery positions. Crowdstrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, told PBS, “Ukraine’s artillery men were targeted by the same hackers…that targeted DNC, but this time they were targeting cellphones [belonging to the Ukrainian artillery men] to try to understand their location so that the Russian artillery forces can actually target them in the open battle.”
Dmitri Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
The connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is relevant given that the Atlantic Council—which is is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk—has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with Russia. As I pointed out in the pages of The Nation in November, the Atlantic Council has spent the past several years producing some of the most virulent specimens of the new Cold War propaganda.
It would seem then that a healthy amount of skepticism toward a government report that relied, in part, on the findings of private-sector cyber security companies like Crowdstrike might be in order. And yet skeptics have found themselves in the unenviable position of being accused of being Kremlin apologists, or worse. . . .
5. The OUN/B milieu in the U.S. has apparently been instrumental in generating the “Russia did it” disinformation about the high-profile hacks. In the Alternet.org article, Mark Ames highlights several points:
- The “PropOrNot” group quoted in a Washington Post story tagging media outlets, websites and blogs as “Russian/Kremlin stooges/propaganda tools/agents” is linked to the OUN/B heirs now in power in Ukraine. ” . . . One PropOrNot tweet, dated November 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrainian fascist salute “Heroiam Slava!!” [17] to cheer a news item on Ukrainian hackers fighting Russians. The phrase means “Glory to the heroes” and it was formally introduced by the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 congress in Nazi occupied Cracow, as they prepared to serve as Nazi auxiliaries in Operation Barbarossa. . . . ‘the OUN‑B introduced another Ukrainian fascist salute at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow in March and April 1941. This was the most popular Ukrainian fascist salute and had to be performed according to the instructions of the OUN‑B leadership by raising the right arm ‘slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head’ while calling ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ (Slava Ukraїni!) and responding ‘Glory to the Heroes!’ (Heroiam Slava!). . . .”
- The OUN/B heirs ruling Ukraine compiled a list of journalists who were “Russian/Kremlin stooges/propaganda tools/agents,” including personal data and contact information (like that made public in the WikiLeaks data dump of DNC e‑mails). This list was compiled by the Ukrainian intelligence service, interior ministry and–ahem–hackers: “. . . . One of the more frightening policies enacted by the current oligarch-nationalist regime in Kiev is an online blacklist [42] of journalists accused of collaborating with pro-Russian ‘terrorists.’ [43] The website, ‘Myrotvorets’ [43] or ‘Peacemaker’—was set up by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultranationalist ideologies as Parubiy and the newly-appointed neo-Nazi chief of the National Police. . . . The website is designed to frighten and muzzle journalists from reporting anything but the pro-nationalist party line, and it has the backing of government officials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s successor to the KGB), the powerful Interior Minister Avakov and his notorious far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko [closely associated with the Azov Battalion]. Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrainian fascist salute: “Slava Ukraini!” [Glory to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anonymous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) identity, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hackers who posted the deadly “Myrotvorets” blacklist of “treasonous” journalists. . . .”
-
Helmets of the Ukrainian Azov battalion: Your tax dollars at work
A Ukrainian activist named Alexandra Chalupa has been instrumental in distributing the “Russia did it” disinformation to Hillary Clinton and influencing the progress of the disinformation in the media. ” . . . . One of the key media sources [46] who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group ‘US United With Ukraine Coalition’ [47], which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests. . . . In one leaked DNC email [50] earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited ‘to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.’ In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source [46] ‘proving’ that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers. . . .”
6a. Andrei Artemenko wasn’t the only Ukrainian politician to approach the Trump administration with a peace plan in early 2017. Yulia Tymoshenko did the same thing in February, saying Trump promised her that he would “not abandon Ukraine.”
Additionally, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine and a political ally of Tymoshenko, claims he traveled to the US in December and January and delivered to the U.S. Department of Justice proof of “political corruption by (Ukraine’s) top officials.” And he apparently gave the same material to Artemenko in 2015. And while Nalyvaichenko says he doesn’t back Artemenko’s peace plan, he did admit to submit a peace plan of his own to the US government.
Nalyvaichenko is a direct heir to the OUN/B, having run Ukrainian intelligence (the SBU) along the lines of the OUN/B. Nalyvaichenko is very close to Pravy Sektor and Dimitry Yarosh.
Peace proposals by anti-Russian figues include one by Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch who also a member of the anti-Russian Atlantic Council.
. . . . But Artemenko is not the only Ukrainian politician to reach out to the White House behind President Petro Poroshenko’s back.
Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister and leader of Batkivshchyna Party, had a brief meeting with U.S. President Donald J. Trump before the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Feb. 3, during which Trump reportedly promised her that he would “not abandon Ukraine.”
And Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine and a political ally of Tymoshenko, says he visited the U.S. in December and January.
Nalyvaichenko told the Kyiv Post he met there with former Republican Senator Jim DeMint, a Trump advisor and president of the conservative the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.
Nalyvaichenko said he delivered to the U.S. Department of Justice proof of “political corruption by (Ukraine’s) top officials.” He said also delivered to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office materials about alleged money laundering and the illegal use of offshore companies by Poroshenko’s business partner and lawmaker Ihor Kononenko.
Back in 2015, Nalyvaichenko gave the compromising materials on Poroshenko to Artemenko, which he claimed to also give to the U.S. authorities. . . .
6b. Alleged “Russian agent” Paul Manafort–identified in FTR #919 as a probable “advance man” for regimes targeted for destabilization–may well have been the person who recommended to his “client” Yanukovich to fire on the Maidan demonstrators. It was that gunfire that signalled the end of Yanukovich’s government. This reinforces Mr. Emory’s take on Manafort. ” . . . . The lawyer’s demands for explanation spring from the hacking earlier this year of the iPhone of Mr Manafort’s daughter, [since confirmed as genuine–D.E.] Andrea, with around 300,000 messages published in the dark web. One of the texts sent to her sister Jessica said: ‘Don’t fool yourself. That money we have is blood money.’ It continued ‘You know he has killed people in Ukraine? Knowingly, as a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine. Remember when there were all those deaths taking place. A while back. About a year ago. Revolts and what not. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that, to send those people get them slaughtered.’ . . . .”
A hearing took place last week in Kiev on Andrii Artemenko’s efforts to have his citizenship restored. A day later John Bolton, the former American envoy to the UN, and a staunch Donald Trump supporter, told an international conference in the city that he expected some of the people around the US President to go to prison. Investigations into Paul Manafort, meanwhile, are looking at his activities in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian connection in the Trump affair is under increasing scrutiny. Mr Artemenko, an MP, is a relatively unfamiliar name in the expanding and colourful cast of those now entangled. But his links with Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater, a criminal and former business associate of Trump, has become important in establishing whether the Kremlin was actively seeking to influence American policy.
Mr Artemenko has been accused of treason by the government of Petro Poroshenko and stripped of his citizenship. That came after revelations that he reportedly gave details of a secret plan to Mr Sater and Mr Cohen to be passed on to the Trump White House which would, in effect, formalise the dismemberment of Ukraine. The proposal was that sanctions against Russia would be lifted in return for Moscow leasing the Crimea for an unspecified amount of time.
Mr Trump had stated during his election campaign that he may accept the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. Mr Artemenko delivered his plan to Mr Cohen who passed it on, it has been claimed, to Michael Flynn, a former Lieutenant General, who was then Mr Trump’s National Security Adviser. Mr Flynn was himself forced to resign over his contacts with the Russian government and is now the subject of an inquiry over that as well as over lobbying for Recep Tayyep Erdogan’s Turkish government.
It is Mr Manafort who is most immediately in the firing line with his work as Mr Trump’s campaign manager as well as that of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President who was overthrown in the revolution of four years ago and fled to Russia, being examined.
It has been revealed that Mr Manafort was secretly wiretapped by the FBI and has been told by prosecutors that he may face indictment over alleged violations of tax laws, money laundering, and lobbying for a foreign power. Federal agents working for Special Investigator Robert Mueller, who carried out an early morning raid at his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, have taken away documents and computer files which include, it is believed, details of his work for President Yanukovych.
A number of Mr Manafort’s associates have been subpoenaed by Mr Mueller’s team. They include the heads of two consulting firms, Mercury Public Affairs and the Podesta Group, who worked with Mr Manafort in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Bureau, set up under Western supervision, has allegedly discovered secret accounts, the so-called “black ledger”, supposedly showing that in a period of five years, between 2007 and 2012, when Mr Manafort received $12.7m from Mr Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Officials hold that the money was part of an illegal clandestine system which had been used to pay off a number of figures. Mr Manafort has insisted that he had not received the money.
Human rights groups in Ukraine also want to question Mr Manafort about killings during the Maidan protests in Kiev in 2014. Eugenia Zakrevska, a lawyer representing families of victims, is part of a team seeking information on who was complicit in President Yanukovych’s ordering security forces to open fire on demonstrators.
The lawyer’s demands for explanation spring from the hacking earlier this year of the iPhone of Mr Manafort’s daughter, Andrea, with around 300,000 messages published in the dark web. One of the texts sent to her sister Jessica said: “Don’t fool yourself. That money we have is blood money.” It continued “You know he has killed people in Ukraine? Knowingly, as a tactic to outrage the world and get focus on Ukraine. Remember when there were all those deaths taking place. A while back. About a year ago. Revolts and what not. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that, to send those people get them slaughtered.”
In another text she said: “He is cash-poor right now. And now Ukraine is late in paying him.”
No evidence has been presented that Mr Manafort was responsible for deaths and Andrea Manafort has refused to comment on the texts. Ms Zakrevska, however, wants Mr Manafort “to clarify the allegations contained in the text messages and to contact us with any information you may have about events that occurred in central Kiev between 18 and 20 February 2014”.
Mr Artemenko, according to a New York Times report “emerged from the opposition” organised against President Poroshenko by Mr Manafort and was instigated in putting together the “peace deal” by figures close to Vladimir Putin. This is denied by the MP complains that that “anyone who has a personal opinion in Ukraine is automatically named a Russian spy. I don’t have such connections with Russia, that is the reason why I tried to involve the Trump administration on this issue and not the Kremlin.”
…
But the man Mr Artemenko chose to help him get his plan to the Trump administration boasts of the sheer extent of his Russian connections. Felix Sater, born Felix Sheferovsky in Russia, whose family emigrated to the US when he was six, had declared that he could get the Kremlin’s backing to make Mr Trump the US President.
“Our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it … I will get Putin on this programme and we will get Trump elected,” he emailed Mr Cohen, a lifelong friend. Another excited email to Mr Trump’s lawyer said “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a President?”
Mr Sater’s connections were enough to ensure that Ivanka Trump got to seat on Putin’s chair at the Presidential office in the Kremlin. He had chaperoned her and Donald Jr on a trip to Moscow at the request of Mr Trump. Ivanka recalls the trip included “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin” and this may have involved sitting at President Putin’s desk.
Mr Sater was jailed in 1991 for slashing a man with a broken cocktail glass (a margarita) and he was also convicted for involvement in an investment scam in which Russian and American organised crime groups targeted the elderly, some of whom were Holocaust survivors. On that occasion he avoided a potential sentence of 20 years, paying a £25,000 fine instead. He also became a federal informer. According to prosecution documents he supplied highly valuable material on al-Qaeda, Russian organised crime, the American mafia and foreign governments.
Mr Artemenko, Mr Sater and Mr Cohen met at a Manhattan restaurant earlier this year where, according to Mr Artemenko and Mr Sater, the Ukraine plan was discussed at length and Mr Cohen offered to take it to Michael Flynn. The New York Times reported that he subsequently delivered it personally, in a sealed envelope, to the President’s National Security Adviser. Mr Cohen later denied this account. The newspaper stands by its story, saying that he had acknowledged what he had done to its journalists.
Mr Flynn was forced to resign soon afterwards. Investigators now have obtained a copy of the Artemenko plan. Prosecution lawyers are said to be considering whether it constituted a covert attempt by a foreign power to influence US policy.
Mr Artemenko feels he has been caught in the crossfire between Mr Trump and “the liberal media”. He will continue with his “Roadmap for Peace”, he says, and strive to regain Ukrainian nationality – his birth right. A source close to him refused to say whether or not he has agreed to meet Robert Mueller’s investigators.
6c. It’s worth noting that Paul Manafort has confirmed that some of the hacked texts are real. As the following article also notes, Andrea Manafort was actually with her dad in Florida during the sniper attacks. Might he have shared details of his behavior visa
A Ukrainian human rights attorney representing the victims of mass police shootings in Kiev in 2014 has asked prosecutors to investigate what are purported to be the hacked text messages of one of Paul Manafort’s daughters, saying the texts point to possible influence Manafort had with Ukraine’s president during that period.
“You know he has killed people in Ukraine? Knowingly,” Andrea Manafort allegedly wrote of her father in March 2015 in an angry series of texts to her sister, Jessica, about her father’s personal and professional life.
“Remember when there were all those deaths taking place. A while back. About a year ago. Revolts and what not,” reads another text in reference to the bloodshed in Kiev.
“Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered.”
“He has no moral or legal compass,” Andrea allegedly wrote about her father earlier as part of the same conversation.
The messages were obtained from a hacker website that in February posted four years’ worth of texts, consisting of 300,000 messages, apparently taken from Andrea Manafort’s iPhone.
Paul Manafort: No comment
Paul Manafort currently faces an FBI investigation over millions of dollars’ worth of payments he allegedly received while working as a political strategist for Ukraine’s Russia-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort has denied receiving the undeclared cash payments.
Protesters descended on Kiev’s central square in a peaceful protest in the winter of 2013 when Yanukovych unexpectedly backed out of a trade deal with the European Union under pressure from the Kremlin. Close to 100 people died in the shootings in the weeks before Yanukovych fled in February 2014.
Ukrainian authorities say Yanukovych created conditions that allowed security forces to kill the pro-Western protesters in Kiev, but so far have not been able to charge him because he is in Russia.
Manafort has not been linked to the shootings.
Asked by CNN to comment, Manafort said via text message: “Comment on what. There is nothing.”
Manafort would not confirm whether the texts were genuine, but in a Politico story last month on the texts, he indicated that some of them were.
The texts suggest that Manafort and his daughter were together in Florida on the day of the worst violence in Kiev on February 20th, when close to 50 people died.
Manafort already influential in Ukraine
Thursday, the human rights lawyer, Eugenia Zakrevska, filed a motion in Kiev requesting that prosecutors verify the contents of the text message dump and take measures to compel US authorities to question Manafort.
“I call on Mr. Manafort to clarify the allegations contained in the text messages and to contact us with any information he may have on those events,” Zakrevska told CNN.
Zakrevska and a special prosecution unit have been working together on several concurrent cases looking into the violence in and around Kiev’s Independence Square.
Zakrevska said all of the killings would have already taken place by the time Manafort met his daughter the evening of the 20th, if the texts’ timestamps are accurate, and she thought it was unlikely that Andrea actually witnessed Paul Manafort personally directing Kiev police forces.
“But this doesn’t rule out Manafort’s influence on Yanukovych’s actions and decisions during that period,” Zakrevska said.
Serhiy Gorbatyuk, Ukraine’s prosecutor for special investigations, confirmed to CNN that his office received Zakrevska’s motion and said the text messages would be investigated and potentially entered into evidence. “We will check thoroughly to verify if they are real or not.”
Asked by CNN about the prospect of an investigation by the general prosecutors’ office, Manafort replied: “Total BS on GP (general prosecutor).”
Manafort began working for Yanukovych in 2004 and grew to be an influential figure in Ukraine who had the ear of the President. After Yanukovych was ousted and pro-Western forces took the reins, Manafort stayed on in the country to help rebrand Yanukovych’s Party of Regions as “Opposition Bloc.”
…
Covert methods and ‘shady email’
The text messages, if genuine, shed light both on the last days of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine and a turbulent period in the Trump campaign last summer, when Trump shook up his team’s leadership structure.
They also cover the time period when Russia, according to US intelligence agencies, may have been conducting hacks into email accounts associated with the Democratic Party.
In the same 2015 conversation with her sister, Andrea allegedly suggests to Jessica that their father used covert methods to send messages to Ukraine.
“I was there when it happened. I saw him on his shady email,” she allegedly wrote. “They don’t write emails. They log on and write in the drafts So it’s never transmitted over any servers.”
In another alleged exchange with Jessica, in June 2016, Andrea plays down her father’s involvement in the hacks of the Democratic Party emails.
“Pretty crazy about all the email hacking huh?” the texts read. “Dad must be over the moon.”
“Oh i saw.” is the reply. “The russians.”
“Well it wasn’t dad’s doing. It was hackers,” Andrea allegedly writes back. “No clue who the hackers were. Fbi is looking into it.”
———-
6d. Reinforcing the hypothesis that the Maidan shootings were a provocation is the disclosure by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor that the rifles allegedly used to fire on the Maidan demonstrators were recovered by an alleged Yanukovich operative and leader of the snipers who was one of the demonstrators on the Maidan! “ . . . Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko says that the man who helped the so-called “black hundred” of police task force Berkut, who had been shooting at protesters during the Revolution of Dignity, flee Kyiv and deliberately drowned their weapons to conceal evidence, was himself one of the participants of the Maidan protests. ‘With the help of military counterintelligence, we have found weapons of the ‘black hundred,’ including a sniper rifle, which the entire country saw on footage showing the shooting at the protesters from outside the October Palace,” he told the 112 Ukraine TV channel. . . . ‘We found it with a large number of automatic rifles on the bottom of one of Kiev’s lakes. They were cut and drowned in one batch by a single group, whose leader is one of the targets of our investigation. Unfortunately, this man who, according to our version, upon the orders of [former Interior Minister Vitaliy] Zakharchenko helped the ‘black hundred’ flee Kyiv, destroyed and drowned their weapons, he, himself, was with us on the Maidan,’ Lutsenko said. . . . ”
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko says that the man who helped so-called “black hundred” of police task force Berkut, who had been shooting at protesters during the Revolution of Dignity, flee Kyiv and deliberately drowned their weapons to conceal evidence, was himself one of the participants of the Maidan protests.
“With the help of military counterintelligence, we have found weapons of the “black hundred,” including a sniper rifle, which the entire country saw on footage showing the shooting at the protesters from outside the October Palace,” he told the 112 Ukraine TV channel.
“We found it with a large number of automatic rifles on the bottom of one of Kiev’s lakes. They were cut and drowned in one batch by a single group, whose leader is one of the targets of our investigation. Unfortunately, this man who, according to our version, upon the orders of [former Interior Minister Vitaliy] Zakharchenko helped the “black hundred” flee Kyiv, destroyed and drowned their weapons, he, himself, was with us on the Maidan,” Lutsenko said.
As UNIAN reported earlier, the Prosecutor General’s Office July 14 conducted searches at the houses of persons involved in assisting the troops from Berkut police special forces’ “black hundred” in fleeing Kyiv after the bloody killings of the Maidan activists and subsequent destruction of their weapons.
Earlier, Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios said: “When public learns who is involved in this, people will be very surprised.” According to him, information to be published may cause rejection, “but the truth is the truth.”
The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the "ET" Myth
Following the reports that the Mueller investigation was about to issue its first round of charges in the #TrumpRussia investigation, the big question was whether or not the charges would be over something unrelated to the Trump campaign (e.g. like money-laundering that was discovered over the course of the investigation) or whether or not it would actual tie in to the whole #TrumpRussia affair (e.g. something showing the Trump campaign colluding with Russian government officials over the Democratic hacks). And sure enough we got both! In that respect in didn’t disappoint.
First we got the indictment of Paul Manafort, who was probably #1 on the list of people expected to be arrested, along with his long-time business associate Rick Gates. It appears to mostly involve crimes related to their work in Ukraine, consisting of 12 counts of conspiracy against the U.S., conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) statements, false statements and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, according to a Mueller spokesperson. All in all it wasn’t particularly surprising or necessarily related to anything involving the Trump campaign.
And then there was the second round of reports involving a relatively obscure Trump campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos. It was much, much more #TrumpRussia-related:
“Papadopoulos, who was named by Trump in March 2016 as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, was first charged under seal in July and ultimately pleaded guilty in October to lying to federal agents investigating Russian interference in the presidential election.”
A young foreign policy advisor who joins the Trump campaign in March of 2016. And what makes March a notable month in the history of Democratic hacks? It was March when APT28 (Fancy Bear) allegedly phished John Podesta’s email credentials and broke into the DNC’s.
So the same month these twin hacks take place we have George Papapdouplos joining the Trump campaign, and then meeting with a mysterious professor, identified as Josphe Mifsud, who, in April, tells Papadopoulos that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including thousands of Clinton’s emails:
Well that, uh, rather conspicuous. But it gets a lot more conspicuous when we learn that Trump campaign was well aware of Papadopoulo’s ‘pipeline’ to Moscow since Papadopoulos made this clear duing a meeting in March and claimed he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin. And then he updated campaign officias for months on his efforts to broker some kind of meeting:
“In response, one high-ranking campaign official emailed another official Papadopoulos’s offer, adding, “We need someone to communicate that [Trump] is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.””
Note that it’s already been confirmed that Paul Manafort is the campaign official who said “We need someone to communicate that [Trump] is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
And adding to the intrigue the woman Papadopoulos thought was Putin’s niece (but wasn’t) who was communicating with him and encouraging all these efforts to arrange a Trump campaign/Moscow meeting:
So we have a young energy analyst joining the Trump team in March of 2016, where his only real asset he brings to the campaign his is alleged ties to the Kremlin. After joining the campaign he gets into contact with a mysterious professor who suggests the Russian government has “dirt” on Hillary and thousands of email. And also a mystery woman who convinced him she’s Putin’s niece. And then Papadopoulos spends months trying to arrange a meeting between the Trump campaign and Moscow but it never seems to pan out. It’s rather amazing. Especially in the context of things like:
1. The Felix Sater push to get Michael Cohen to travel to Russia to get the “Trump Tower Moscow” deal worked out fizzled with now Kremlin response in January of 2016.
2. The notorious meeting in Trump Tower between Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. initiated when Rob Goldstone wrote an email about the Russian government having “dirt” on Hillary.
3. The “opposition research” team of Peter Smith that set out to discover Russian hackers on the dark web who were allegedly in possession of Hillary’s hacked emails. A team that apparently included Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway and brought them into contact with “Guccifer 2.0” (who apparently told them to contact neo-Nazi hacker Andrew ‘the weev’ Auernheimer).
Yes, we appear have the Trump campaign (or people affiliated with it) trying to reach out to the Russian government at the same time the Russian government was trying to reach out to the Trump campaign. What kind of crazy game of spy-footsie was going on here? Given the initial rebuffs of the Trump team that Moscow appeared to deliver to the Sater/Cohen outreach effort in January of 2016 it’s possible that much of the Russian efforts were intended to ameliorate any hurt feelings for a potential future president.
But what’s the explanation for why the Trump campaign seemed to simultaneously want to reach out to the Kremlin while constantly rebuffing Papadopoulos’s outreach efforts? After all, it seemed like that was why the campaign hired the guy in the first place. As the following article notes, Papadopoulos sent out his first email floating a meeting with Putin just three days after joining the Trump campaign in March of 2016. And by May, Papadopoulos was apparently in contact with Ivan Timofeev, a senior official at the government-funded Russian International Affairs Council the organization. Papadopoulos told the Trump campaign that Timofeev reached out to him that Russian foreign ministry officials were open to a Trump visit to Moscow and requested that the campaign and Russians write a formal letter outlining the meeting. But that effort was rebuffed by the Trump campaign too.
So the pattern we seem to see is that the Trump campaign wanted Russian government contacts, just not very high-level contacts. And yet in early 2016 we have Trump Org lawyer Michael Cohen reaching out to get Kremlin help to build Trump Tower Moscow in January of 2016. You almost couldn’t do something more conspicuously ‘pro-Russian’ than to announce a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow and yet that was part of the plan Sater and Cohen were pursuing. Don’t forget that Sater was selling the deal as a way to help Trump win by demonstrating what a dealmaker he was.
So while the Trump team’s desire to get into contact with the Kremlin didn’t appear to change, the team’s willingness to do these contacts in a high profile manner did appear to change pretty significantly over of the course of 2016. And such a change in behavior makes sense since Trump became the nominee and had an actual presidential race to run. But it’s still pretty notable shift in behavior. Especially given how Papadopoulos didn’t appear to shift his behavior at all and was apparently repeatedly trying to arrange these meetings for months despite being consistently rebuffed:
“Three days after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, the youngest of the new advisers sent an email to seven campaign officials with the subject line: “Meeting with Russian Leadership — Including Putin.””
Just three days after he joins the team he floats the idea of a meeting with Putin. And keeps floating the idea for months, apparently with the encouragement of some Russian contacts:
The guy was persistent. You have to give him that. And yet these emails appear to indicate that the Trump team was persistent in ignoring Papadopoulos’s proposed. Perhaps they were redundant or too high profile given the other avenues of communication but that’s all part of the #TrumpRussia mystery: we have evidence of both covert Kremlin outreach efforts (the Peter Smith Dark Web team) and extremely overt efforts (like Trump saying “Russia, please hack Hillary’s emails” in the middle of campaign event). Both of these efforts were happening simultaneously while the Russian government itself appeared to be ignoring Trump campaign outreach while initiating its own outreach efforts. It’s like some sort of tragicomic spy parody farce. And that doesn’t even include all of the incredulous hacking evidence where the Russian hackers appeared to be out to implicate themselves.
And then there’s the mystery professor, Joseph Mifsud, who told Papadopoulos about the “dirt” and thousands of emails on Hillary. It turns out he’s a professor who claims he has no ties to the Russian government even though you can google them. It’s one of the latest twists in this tragicomic spy farce:
“One obvious question for the professor is why he told the Post he had “absolutely” no contacts with Russian officials when on-line material suggests he has. There are no indication in the Mueller statement whether his team has questioned Mifsud about the Clinton “dirt” or Papadopoulos’s initiative to create a back-channel bond between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s office.”
Yeah, like so much of this story, almost nothing makes sense because it’s almost like everyone wanted to get caught.
All in all, if the Kremlin really did plan an election disruption campaign as some sort of attempt to discredit the US democracy, it doesn’t appear to be a campaign simply dedicated to embarrassing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. It also appeared to involve getting lots of evidence demonstrating how the GOP was more than happy to collude with the Kremlin and engage in a joint coverup, thus demonstrating the profound corruption of the Republicans too. And when you look at what’s getting exposed — a little bit of DNC dirty laundry vs evidence the GOP enthusiastically work with foreign powers to win elections and enthusiastically work to cover it up — it would appear to be Kremlin campaign that, in the end will do much, much more damage to the GOP. At least it should be far more damaging to the GOP based on all available evidence...available evidence that is in many cases available precisely because of the inexplicably overt nature of so much of the behavior of all these apparent Kremlin agents, either those contacting the Trump campaign with incriminating ‘the Russian government has dirt on Hillary and wants to share it with you!’ emails or the hackers themselves who appear to have run a self-implicating frame up job. Thanks, Kremlin?
Here’s an article with some important details about on Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor in London who was allegedly the main point of contact between Trump campaign foreign policy advisors George Papadopoulos, and what appears to be an odd Kremlin intelligence operation of teasing the Trump campaign with promises of “thousands of Hillary’s emails”: According to the following article, Mifsud wasn’t simply telling Papadopoulos about rumors that the Kremlin had “dirt” on Hillary in the form of thousands of emails. In April of 2016, Mifsub reportedly told Papadopoulos that he had returned from Moscow where he has a meeting with “high-level officials” who discussed with him these thousands of emails.
Additionally, the following piece it was Mifsud who introduced Papadopoulos to the Russian woman who pretended to be Vladimir Putin’s niece. So if this really was a Russian intelligence operation it appeared they were willing to approach the Trump campaign with figures who could be outed as lying to them WITH GOOGLE. After all, if someone is claiming to be Putin’s niece that should be something that can, and should, be verified by the Trump campaign, right? Like, what’s her name and which of Putin’s siblings is her parent? Wouldn’t there be all sort of frantic research into this Putin niece by a campaign that was about to collude with Putin’s niece? Apparently not.
It’s the latest twist in an alleged Kremlin intelligence operation that appears to have the creation of high comedy spy farce as one of its key objectives:
“When the two men first met, in Italy in March 2016, Mr. Mifsud quickly promised “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton, then the likely Democratic presidential nominee, in the form of “thousands of emails” obtained by the Russian government, prosecutors say.”
It’s somewhat unclear from the reporting if Mifsud promised “dirt” in the form of “thousands of emails” back when they first met in March of 2016 or a month later, because according to this passage it wasn’t intil April that Mifsud told Papadopoulos about the “dirt” and “thousands of email”:
And the timing is rather important here in terms of getting a sense of what the Trump team thought it was getting into, because the fake Putin niece appears toh have entered the picture on March 24th:
So was the Trump team thinking it was in contact with Putin’s niece before or after it was told the Kremlin had thousands of Hillary’s emails? It’s an interesting question although given all the subsequent contacts — like the Rob Goldstone meeting at the Trump Tower — it’s not like the Trump team hasn’t demonstrated an ample willingness to collect “dirt” that it thought was coming from the Kremlin.
It will certainly be interesting to see what more is released about Papadopoulos’s Collusion Adventures. But if there’s one thing this chapter in #TrumpRussia makes clear, it’s that when Rob Goldstone sent those over-the-top emails to Donald Trump Jr. in early June, emails that almost seemed like an intelligence fishing attempt to see if the Trump campaign was willing to accept such overt and self-incriminating overture sent over email, the question of whether or not the Trump campaign would be receptive to over-to-top overt overtures was already thoroughly answered months earlier by George Papadopoulus.
Following up on the strange case of the enthusiastic collusion of George Papadopoulos, the following article makes a couple important clarifications. First, regarding the question of when exactly the mysterious professor Mifsud floated the rumor that Moscow had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails” (March or April), the article notes that it was definitely “on or about April 26th” of 2016.
The article also notes that in addition to introducing Papadopoulos to the woman claiming to be Vladimir Putin’s niece it was Mifsud who also introduced Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, the senior official from the government-funded Russian International Affairs Council. So the two people who claimed to be reaching out to the Trump campaign on behalf of the Russian government via Papadopoulus were both introduced by Mifsud the mysterious Maltese professor:
“The professor, who was not identified in court documents, introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to others, including someone connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a woman who he believed was a relative of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Papadopoulos repeatedly tried to arrange a meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, court records show.”
Recall how the Russian International Affairs Council included a number of people from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, so the reference to “someone connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is likely a reference to Ivan Timofeev.
And here’s the clarification on when the “thousands of emails” idea was first floated:
So that helps give us a better picture of the role Professor Mifsud played in all this. A pretty big role in appears. First he befriends Papadopoulos in March. Then he introduces him to a fake Putin niece later that month. Then, a month later, he tells Papadopoulos that Moscow has thousands of Hillary’s emails. And at some point during all this he introduces Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council who informs Papadopoulus that Russian foreign ministry officials are willing to meeting with the the Trump campaign and requested that the campaign and Russians write a formal letter outlining the meeting. A fake Putin niece, the hint of Hillary’s emails, and request for a formal letter outlining a meeting with Russian foreign ministry officials.
Given all that, and given how many of these interactions happened before Trump was officially the GOP nominee, one of the interesting questions raised by all this is whether or not the Trump campaign was the only GOP campaign tempted with that kind of rumor of Hillary’s emails. It’s possible, although it’s also worth noting that when Papadopoulus was reportedly informed of this “dirt” on Hillary it was in late April, when the GOP primary was still underway but not for much longer. Ted Cruz and John Kasich both dropped out on May 3rd and 4th, so Trump was effectively the GOP’s nominee by early May and appeared to be on his way to being the nominee in April. So if the Kremlin really was reaching out to the Trump team via Papadopoulos in April to dangle a “we got Hillary’s emails” offer to it wouldn’t be stunning if the Trump team was the only campaign that was made that offer.
Still, the question of who else may have known about these “Kremlin has Hillary’s emails” rumors during the 2016 campaign, either told by someone like the Professor who we are assuming is working as a Russian intelligence proxy or told by the Trump team after they found out, is a pretty massive question. Rumors spread, after all.
For instance, might Ted Cruz’s campaign have received a hot tip from someone claiming to be a a Kremlin proxy about thousands of Hillary emails possessed by the Russian government? It will be interesting to see if anything of that nature comes out over the course of the investigation. And it turns out there was at least one element of Ted Cruz’s campaign that definitely heard rumors that Hillary’s “33,000 deleted emails” were floating around somewhere. That would be Cambridge Analytica. Don’t forget, Cambridge Analytica and Robert and Rebekah Mercer all backed Ted Cruz. It was only after he lost that they switched over to Team Trump.
And according to the following report, at some point in at some point in June of 2016 — the month Guccifer 2.0 first emerged and the month Cambridge Analytica formally joined the Trump campaign — Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix actually emailed Julian Assange to ask if Cambridge Analytica could help index Hillary’s thousands of stolen email so they could be more easily searchable online:
“Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton’s missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. (CNN later reported Cambridge backer Rebekah Mercer was one of the email’s recipients.) Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix’s email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own.”
So after the Trump campaign basically gets teased about Moscow getting its hands on Hillary’s emails in late April we find Cambridge Analytica, now working for the Trump campaign, actually contacting Julian Assange about helping Wikileaks release them. And Assange confirmed this email exchange did indeed take place:
And don’t forget that early June was when the bizarre outreach to Rob Goldstone took place culminating in the June 9th Trump Tower meeting.
It’s all part of why it’s not at all surprising to see the Trump administration and rest of the GOP running as fast as it can from the firm:
“Cambridge who? Anawhatica?” That’s basically the GOP’s response at this point. For understandable reasons.
And just to be clear, here’s an article that points out that this email was sent in June. Apparently Nix had to point out to Rebekah Mercer that he had already contact Assange in June after Mercer contacted Nix in August floating exactly the idea:
“Nix reportedly responded that he had already contacted WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, in June and asked him to share the emails with the company so they could help disperse them, but said Assange had denied his request.”
June was quite a month for the Trump campaign.
Ok, let’s review: we have this strange outreach effort starting in March centered around the mysterious Mr. Mifsud who promptly introduced George Papadoulus to a fake Putin niece. Then he starts talking about Hillary’s emails in late April. And then we have the infamous Trump Tower meeting on June 9th that started off with an email from Goldstone to Trump Jr. promising Russian government help but instead the meeting appeared to mostly be about overturning the Magnitsky act. Guccifer 2.0 goes public on June 14th, and then at some point in June, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica contacts Julian Assange and seemingly acts as if he believes Assange already has those emails.
So You have to wonder...did that delegation during that June 9th meeting tell the Trump campaign that Wikileaks already had the emails? Or maybe some sort of cryptic hint pointing the campaign in Wikileaks’s direction? Because it seems pretty clear that the Trump campaign had those emails on its mind during the meeting. How could the topic not have come up?
And if that happened and the delegation really did direct the Trump campaign towards Wikileaks for those emails it once again raises the question: were the Russian intentionally toying with the Trump campaign? Kind of like introducing a fake Putin niece and then hinting at possession of Hillary’s emails but never delivering them, that kind of toying?
We’ll probably never know the answer to that, but it hard to ignore the possibility that getting the Trump team to totally implicate itself in Russian collusion would have been one of the goals of Kremlin plans to mess around with the US election. After all, if the Kremlin really was planning on waging an over-the-top election interference fiasco the self-implicating hacking campaign filled with “I’m a Russian hacker” clues makes no sense because it’s not like Moscow could reasonably expect to benefit significantly from a Trump victory after a hacking campaign filled with “I’m a Russian!” clues. But pulling off a self-implicating hacking campaign against Hillary while getting the Trump team to implicate itself in the hacking, on the other hand, does make some amount of sense. At least the payout isn’t predicated on getting special treatment from the new administration. It would still be a pretty crazy plan...just not as crazy as the plan we’re expected to assume the Kremlin had where the massive “I’m a Russian” hacking is done in order to get a President installed who will lift all the Russian sanctions.
So might we be seeing the outlines of a Kremlin campaign designed to smear the Democrats with the email hacks while simultaneously making sure Team Trump leaves a long trail of evidence leading back to those hacks and collusion with Moscow? It would be a pretty high risk gambit, but if the plan was always for this whole this to explode in a mega-scandal that probably wouldn’t have been as high risk as a plan to pull off a scheme this self-incriminating without getting caught.
For The Record 981 is the most coherent piece of modern political analysis. Literally nothing being broadcast in the mass-media (left-right-center-alternative included) comes close to the amount of factual triangulation that has been presented here. Bravo!
I must say though, if the end goal is a fascist revolution, the ring leaders must realize that the entire planet is going thru an accelerated state of decay. Ice caps melting, tropical forests destroyed, deserts expanding, rivers and seas poisoned, ect. What is to be had if you can no longer live on the planet?
I this why the privatization of space exploration is being entertained?
All of the world’s fascist ring leaders hang out in low-orbit while they release a plague that will wipe out the rest of us?
What is the end game?
@Robert Montenegro–
At your earliest convenience, please examine FTR #982, which further develops the situation.
Best,
Dave
We just got some more information on the timing of the offer by Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix to Julian Assange back in June 2016 to help Wikileaks make the presumed cache of Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails more searchable online: According to Nix, that offer was made in “early June”. And unless he’s using the term “early” loosely here that almost certainly means this offer to Wikileaks was made before the June 14th news reports about the DNC getting hacked:
“Speaking at a digital conference in Lisbon, Alexander Nix said he had read a newspaper report about WikiLeaks’ threat to publish a trove of hacked Democratic party emails, and said he asked his aides to approach Assange in early June 2016 to ask “if he might share that information with us”, according to remarks published by the Wall Street Journal.”
Early June 2016. That’s the window. But we can probably narrow the window down even more based on Nix’s explanation because he said “he had read a newspaper report about WikiLeaks’ threat to publish a trove of hacked Democratic party emails”.
So which news report about Assange’s threat was he referring to? Well, probably this one from June 12th:
“Assange’s comments came in an interview on ITV’s Peston on Sunday. “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct,” Assange said.He did not specify when or how many emails would be published.”
That report is from Sunday June 12th, 2016, and it’s based on Assange’s comments made “on ITV’s Peston on Sunday.” So if that’s the report Nix was referring to that would be Nix’s outreach to Wikileaks after the notorious June 9th Trump Town meeting. And it was June 14th when the first reports of the DNC hacks hit the news and June 15th when Guccifer 2.0 first went public and started dumping documents. And this, of course, is assuming Nix is telling the truth.
But also note how there’s nothing in the above article hinting at Assange having emails from Hillary’s private email server and he was already published 30,000+ Hillary-related emails in March of 2016:
But as we saw from previous reports, when Nix reached out to Assange, it was about Hillary’s 33,000 missing emails (emails that were deemed personal and not related to her State Department work and deleted before Hillary’s private server was turned over to the FBI). So when Assange talks about an impending new cache of Hillary’s emails it’s not like Nix should have automatically assumed this meant Assange had those 33,000 missing emails because Assange clearly had a large cache of Hillary-related emails.
So it’s worth noting that there were in fact news reports that the Russian government had indeed hacked Hillary’s email server and had those 33,000 missing emails. Or rather, ‘news’ reports. It turns out Gateway Pundit, one of the least credible right-wing blogs on the internet, published a piece claiming exactly that on May 10, 2016. And here’s the kicker: It’s based on a ‘report’ from WhatDoesItMean.com, a site that makes InfoWars seem sane in comparison:
“The Kremlin is debating whether to release the 20,000 emails they have hacked off of Hillary Clinton’s server.”
A link to WhatDoesItMean.com about the Kremlin debating over whether or not it should released Hillary’s hacked personal emails. That’s what was swirling around the right-wing media cesspool in early May of 2016.
And note how Andrew Napolitano made sure this rumor made it into Fox News:
Napolitano also reference this rumor in a piece in Reason Magazine on May 12, 2016.
And recall that Trump campaign team member George Papadopoulos was reportedly told by Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor, that the Russian government had thousands of Hillary’s emails in late April of 2016. So around a week after that encounter we get a report from WhatDoesItMean.com on May 6th about the Russian government debating releasing Hillary’s emails that gets promoted by Gateway Pundit on May 10 and then pushed into the mainstream-ish news by Andrew Napolitano shortly afterwards.
The timing of it all is pretty interesting.
With reports of North Korea building new ICBMs as the same factory that produced missiles capable or reaching the Unites States, here’s a pair of stories that are rather interesting regarding the story about the suspected acquisition of Ukrainian ballistic missile technology by North Korea:
First, the Atlantic Council has a bit of a conflict of interest scandal on its hands. Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Anders Aslund published a paper earlier this year touting the alleged enormous progress made by Latvian banks regarding the money-laundering Latvian banks have a reputation to be deeply involved with. The problem is, he was asked to write this paper by Sally Painter, who was named to the Atlantic Council’s board in April of 2017. Painter is also a longtime lobbyist for Latvia’s “nonresident banks” (banks were a large portion of the clients are based in other countries).
Aslund never indicated in the paper that he was asked to write it by lobbyist for exactly the kinds of banks most likely to be engaged in money-laundering, hence the conflict of interest scandal. And he now acknowledges that he wasn’t simply asked to write the paper. He was paid by a consortium of Latvian banks.
The Atlantic Council confirmed that Aslund did disclose the paper to the council, so it wasn’t like it was secret. In addition, The paper was presented at a private event hosted by the Atlantic Council. Interestingly, it wasn’t an official Atlantic Council publication and not found on the Atlantic Council website. At the same time, Aslund’s Atlantic Council affiliation is the first item noted in the paper’s explanation of its authorship. It’s like an unofficial Atlantic Council publication.
Here’s where the North Korean nuclear missile program comes in: One of the banks that paid Aslund was a subsidiary of particularly notorious Latvian bank, ABLV. At the time of this paper, ABLV was trying to get permission to open a branch in the US. That effort failed, with the US citing a number of concerns over money-laundering, including with entities involved with North Korea’s nuclear technology procurement program in 2017 after North Korea had US and EU sanctions imposed on them. And ABLV was also charged by the US with laundering billions in assets for politically exposed corrupt individuals from Azerbaijan, Russian, and Ukraine. ABLV was forced to shut down shortly after the US issued its report.
So while there’s no direct indication at this point that ABLV was specifically involved with that Ukrainian missile factory, the fact that the bank did a lot of business in Ukraine and was charged with knowingly working with North Korea’s nuclear program sure makes it a reasonable suspect. And that’s part of what makes the story about the Anders Aslund’s paid of absolution of Latvia’s banks so extra scandalous:
“The paper was written and made public in September by Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Anders Aslund, a prominent Swedish economist who lives in the United States. In it, Aslund argued that Latvia’s banks — long criticized as rife with money laundering, much of which is thought to involve Russian clients — had made great strides in enforcing anti–money laundering statutes. Aslund told Re:Baltica, a website that collaborated with BuzzFeed News on this story, that he was asked to write the paper by Sally Painter, a longtime lobbyist for Latvia’s nonresident banks who was named to the Atlantic Council’s board in April 2017.”
So Anders Aslund writes this paper touting the great strides Latvia’s banks have made in enforcing anti-money-laundering rules. When asked about it, Anders says fellow Atlantic Council member Sally Painter asked him to do it. And also acknowledge to BuzzFeed that he was paid by a consortium of Latvian banks, including a subsidiary of ABLV. ABLV was, trying to get permission to open a branch in the US at the time. An effort that failed due to US concerns over money-laundering:
But it wasn’t just US concerns over money-laundering that thwarted ABLV’s ambitions. It was concern that ABLV had engaged in “illicit financial activity ... included transactions for parties ... involved in North Korea’s procurement or export of ballistic missiles”:
ABLV was also apparently involved in money-laundering for “corrupt politically exposed persons” involving people from Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine. Shortly after the US made these charges public (which effectively froze the bank out of international markets), ABLV was forced to close:
So was Aslund’s paid-for paper an official Atlantic Council project? Not quite. It was presented at a private Atlantic Council event, attended by the Latvian ambassador to the US, along with a former Latvian foreign minister was was a member of ABLV’s board at the time. So it sure seems like there was a real push by the Latvian government to get the US to give an ‘all clear’ report on Latvia’s banks and Aslund’s paper was a critical part of that lobbying effort:
Interestingly, an Atlantic Council representative said that neither Aslund nor Sally Painter broke any Atlantic Council rules. So you can apparently pay the Atlantic Council to lobby for you:
And Aslund continues to stand by his paper. The fact that the bank that appeared to be the primary intended beneficiary of his paper was shut down after the US issued a report indicating it was involved with North Korea’s nuclear missile program doesn’t seem to have changed his assessment of Latvia’s banks:
Ok, so that was all rather scandalous, although based on the statements from all the parties involved it wasn’t scandalous at all. Which seems extra scandalous.
Now here’s a report from back in June that gives more information about the US charges against ABLV. As the article notes, it was after North Korea was hit with new US sanctions in 2017 that North Korea turned to ABLV to keep money flowing to its ballistic missile program. So the timing is somewhat ambiguous. The UN issued new sanctions against North Korea in August of 2017, and the US issued additional sanctions in September of 2017. That makes it sound like ABLV’s role in North Korea’s missile program must have been ramping up in the latter half of 2017. Recall that the launch of the surprisingly advanced ballistic missile launch took place in July of 2017. So it’s unclear how much ABLV worked for North Korea before the new rounds of sanctions were imposed in August of September of 2017, but it seems like a good bet that there must have been some sort of prior relationship, making the question of whether or not that prior relationship involved facilitating the payments for the acquisition of that Ukrainian missile technology a very big question:
“When the U.S. hit North Korea with sanctions last year, Pyongyang’s state-owned banks found a quiet backchannel to keep money flowing to the country’s ballistic missile programs, the U.S. says: the tiny European country of Latvia.”
So after the US hits North Korea with sanctions, North Korea turns to ABLV to continue banking in Europe. And note how the US government says this allowed North Korea to continue to procures missiles:
The charges also include ABLV bribing Latvian officials, so this is a potentially huge scandal if it turns out some Latvian officials knew about the North Korean laundering:
The US government also charges that ABLV allowed North Korea to do business using shell companies that ABLV should have known were fronts. In other words, ABLV was a witting accomplice and not just a dupe:
And just to highlight how big a role money-laundering likely plays in Latvia’s banking sector, not how 40 percent of the money in Latvian banks is from foreign deposits. But the foreign holdings have dropped substantially over the last year thanks to the collapse of ABLV:
So it sounds like one of the most problematic banks in one of the most corrupt banking sectors in Europe finally got shut down this year following the scathing US report that included charges of money-laundering for North Korea’s missile procurement networks even after the 2017 US sanctions were imposed. It’s a pretty damning accusation. And as the following article notes, it’s actually worse. Because the US charges against ABLV assert that the bank continued these money-laundering activities for North Korea in the summer of 2017 even after the bank declared a North Korea “no tolerance” policy:
“ABLV’s business practice of banking high-risk shell companies without appropriate risk mitigation policies and procedures has also caused the bank to facilitate transactions for parties connected to U.S.- and UN-designated Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) entities. These designated entities include Foreign Trade Bank (FTB), Koryo Bank, Koryo Credit Development Bank, Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation (KOMID), and Ocean Maritime Management Company (OMM), some of which are involved in North Korea’s procurement or export of ballistic missiles. ABLV facilitated transactions related to North Korea after the bank’s summer 2017 announcement of a North Korea “No Tolerance” policy.”
So ABLV explicitly banned itself from money-laundering for North Korea and proceeded to keep doing it. That’s some serious dedication to customer service, even for highly questionable customers.
And note the charges involving money-laundering for a Ukrainian oligarch, Serhiy Kurchenko:
Serhiy Kurchenko is one of the oligarchs who fled Ukraine in 2014 and is currently in an unknown location. But he’s obviously not the only Ukrainian oligarch ABLV did business with, highlighting how we should expect all sorts of illicit activity involving ABLV and Ukraine’s oligarch. And that all makes ABLV the perfect bank to have facilitated an technology sales of Ukrainian missile technology to North Korea.
So that’s the remarkable story about how a dedication to North Korean money-laundering led to the the downfall of one of the largest banks in Latvia, despite the Atlantic Council’s remarkably sleazy attempts to hold it up.