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Saturday 29 July 2023
Ukraine Notes:
Wagner
Kilner, James (7/29/23) The Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/29/wagner-group-mercenaries-prigozhin-poland-belarus/
- 16,000 immigrants mainly from the Middle East and South Asia had already tried to cross the border from Belarus to Poland this year.
- Wagner training camp in Belarus is near Brest in southern Belarus to train Belarusian special forcer.
- Poland has relocated 1,000 soldiers to its border.
- Wagner Telegram channels have reported 10,000 Wagner mercenaries may relocate to Belarus.
- “In 2021, Belarus flew thousands of migrants to Minsk before moving them to the border in Poland.
- Last year, Wagner fighters in Libya helped to launch boats full of migrants toward Italy.”
- Wagner Telegram has released a recording of Prigozhin praising the coup in Niger.
- Wagner has extensive contacts in Mali which neighbors Niger, where government is fighting the Islamic insurgency.
Almond, Mark (7/28/23) The Telegraph.
- Africa “this conference is part of a revolution in African geopolitics that represents one of the biggest threats to European and American geostrategic interests in the modern era. “
- “…Sub-Saharan Africa has become an arena of Russian intervention against Western allies and interests. To take one recent example, this week’s military coup in the Sahel by army officers in Niger toppled a pro-Western elected president who had hosted the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken just months ago. As in neighboring Mali, the military junta’s supporters appear openly sympathetic to Russia.”
- Prigozhin boasted about the coup against “colonists.”
- (Note: Questions whether US will ignore orders to get out, or remain in the region to counter Wagner).
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www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/31/ukraine-russia-war-moscow-drone-putin-zelensky/
A Russian official accused of war crimes has admitted to relocating more than 700,000 children from Ukraine.
In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Ms Lvova-Belova, accusing them of “illegal deportation of children” from Ukraine.
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United Russia party sources in the Urals region told Verstka website they had shredded pro-war campaign leaflets.
“There is not a single person here who supports the war. There are no Z-machines here,” the source in Putin’s party said. “If you support the war, you will not be elected.”
Western analysts have said that more than 200,000 Russians have been killed or injured in the war. This week, another Russian opposition website reported that overworked doctors in regional hospitals were resigning because of the stress of having to treat so many mentally and physically broken soldiers.
“There are almost no doctors left, and now the last ones are leaving because of unrealistic requirements on them,” a source in the Kemerovo region of Siberia told the New Tablet.
Citizens are also feeling the economic pain. This month, the Russian Central Bank raised interest rates for the first time in a year, warning of inflation linked to a sharp drop in Russia’s labour force.
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www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/international-world/oppenheimer-nuclear-bomb-cancer.html
Excerpts
It does not explore in any depth the costs of deciding to test the bomb in a place where my family and many others had lived for generations.
There were more than 13,000 New Mexicans living within a 50-mile radius. Many of those children, women, and men were not warned before or after the test. Eyewitnesses have told me they believed they were experiencing the end of the world.
New Mexicans who may have been exposed to radioactive fallout from Trinity have never been eligible for compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a 1990 federal law that has provided billions to people exposed during subsequent tests on U.S. soil or during uranium mining.
Oppenheimer” leaves out other stories, too. The Manhattan Project and the nuclear weapons industry used the promise of a better life to entice thousands of people in the Southwest into the uranium mines that supplied the Manhattan Project. The miners went to work each day without adequate safety gear, while supervisors wore it from head to toe
I wept during the scenes in the film leading up to the detonation and during the test itself. I could hardly breathe, my heart was beating so fast. I thought about my dad, who was 4 years old that day. His town, Tularosa, was idyllic back then. After the test, after radioactive ash covered his home, he carried on as he always had drinking fresh milk, eating fresh fruit and vegetables that grew in the contaminated soil. By age 64, he had developed three cancers that he didn’t have risk factors for, two of which were primary oral cancers. He died at the age of 71.
we are left with a film that declines to bear witness to our truth.
This, too, is the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the government he worked for. I will never be able to forgive them for wrecking our lives and walking away.
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www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/state-of-evangelical-america.html
Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.
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While Syria was in the middle of one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern history, President Assad turned to his close ally, Russia, for help. Instead of committing conventional forces in Syria, Putin sent in Prigozhin. Syria provided Wagner Group with the perfect model – prop up dictators and make millions exploiting natural resources in the process. Prigozhin became Putin’s trusted fixer and had another side business, an internet troll farm that pumped out disinformation against those who disagreed with the Kremlin. He would soon turn his keyboard warriors on the United States and the pivotal 2016 election.
— Read on www.msnbc.com/on-assignment/watch/revolt-from-within-the-rise-of-wagner-prigozhin-s-expanding-enterprise-187309125963 -
“I feel pain, and I want revenge,” said Ms. Sulzhenko, 74. “I don’t have the words to say what we should do to them.”
When Zelensky spoke before the US Congress he said the longer this war goes on the more my people hate. He used some of his valuable time to express his concern, his deep feeling of tragedy about what this war was doing to his people.
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