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Monday 2 January 2023
NEWS NOTES
- MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace noted tonight that the DOJ was receiving “undue pressure” to prosecute Trump and his minions. Jesus how ignorant when her program nightly goes through crimes committed by Trump and his people.
- Emails released today by the Jan. 6 Committee show Trump staffers bemoaning their dismal employment prospects after the Jan. 6 coup attempt. Sad that participating in a coup damages your job prospects. One woman said she had been crying for hours over the loss (of her career).
- Jan. 6 was not an “intelligence failure.” This is a cop out on a grand scale. The lack of law enforcement at the capital was the result of deliberate actions on the part of government officials. Since we can’t hold anybody accountable, it becomes an “intelligence failure” for which nobody is responsible. Therefore, it will happen again.
- There were pro-Russian demonstrations in Mali over the weekend. Russia has invested heavily in unstable governments in Africa.
- According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon sent security teams to protect high-level officers in the military on Jan. 6. They did not send these teams to the capitol. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/01/steven-sund-capitol-police-book-jan6/
- A good part of a segment on Nicolle Wallace tonight is detailing all the information available to the government about the possibility of violence on Jan. 6. But, nobody will come to the obvious conclusion – the EVIDENCE, INFORMATION, INTELLIGENCE WAS IGNORED. It wasn’t some kind of vague, nebulous, “intelligence failure.” Information, intelligence was ignored because the men in the position to do something, politically agreed with the perpetrators. Jesus, how can it be clearer?
- Right-wing media is full of complaints about the Proud Boys members being tried in D.C. According to them, “everybody” knows that you can’t get a fair trial in D.C.
- Washington Post ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/01/01/proud-boys-jury-selection/ )reports that defense attorneys of the five Proud Boys being tried in D.C. “are looking for jurors who not only lack a negative perception of the Proud Boys but express no strong feelings about the Holocaust, the Black Lives Matter movement, women’s rights or gay rights.” What kind of imbeciles are they going to wind up with? Holocaust? What Holocaust? No, I don’t have strong feelings about that, whatever it is.”
- This country is driving me mad.
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NEWS/UKRAINE JOURNAL 2023
Monday 2 January 2023
Ukraine: (BBC)
- Donetsk attack by Ukrainians. Hundreds thought dead.
- Figures for the dead are at odds between those reported by the Russians and the Ukrainians.
- Eastern Donetsk attack. Ukrainians say 400 killed and 300 wounded. A school was being used as a base by the Russians. Russian reports on state media is that HYMARS were used. Russians are saying that 15 were injured.
- Russian military bloggers are saying that hundreds have been killed and wounded. Base was being used for conscripts. There has been a lot of anger, saying that Russian commanders should be punished. Some of them say that 1000 conscripts were there waiting to be deployed.
- This could be the largest attack with casualties in the war.
- Another night of attacks on Kyiv, civilian population.
- Global prices are higher because of the war especially in Africa. Some of Africa has strong ties with Russia and Wagner Group has been operating in West Africa.
- Demonstrations in support of Russia have occurred in Mali, there is waving of Russian flags and chants of anti-french sentiments. French forces fighting extremism have withdrawn. The American ambassador to the Ivory Coast has commented on the Wagner Group involvement in the region. “We cannot exist in the same space as those groups who do not respect human rights.” He said. “the presence of Russian mercenaries in any country…has become poorer and less secure…they are not very good fighters and they commit terrible human rights abuses and they are just a destabilizing force.”
- A UN vote to condemn Russia’s actions divided the participants, half voted in favor, 17 abstained, Eritrea voted alongside Russia.
- The House passed a bill to counter Russian investment in Africa.
- This may have alienated some. Some consider it unfair to punish African countries for associating with Russia economically.
- The African Union has avoided taking sides in the war.
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The Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday that 63 service members had been killed in the strike in the city, Makiivka, which is in the Donetsk region. Ukraine claimed that “about 400” Russian soldiers had died. Neither figure could be independently verified. Nyt
A spokesman for the Russian-installed proxy government in the Donetsk region, Daniil Bezsonov, called the strike “a massive blow” and hinted at errors by Russian commanders.
“The enemy inflicted the most serious defeats in this war on us not because of their coolness and talent, but because of our mistakes,” he wrote in a post on Telegram.Kyiv has shifted in recent weeks from using the American-made rocket systems to hit ammunition dumps and supply lines to targeting barracks and other troop concentrations, said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a research institute in Arlington, Va.
Accounts by pro-war military bloggers — who have become influential opinion-makers in Russia amid the censorship of mainstream media — suggested that the strike in Makiivka had proved so deadly partly because of a litany of errors by Moscow’s forces, some of which have been repeated throughout the war.
Ilya Yashin, an anti-Kremlin activist and politician who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in December for “spreading false information” about atrocities committed in the Ukrainian city of Bucha by Russian troops, wrote on Friday that he had been transferred to a jail in Izhevsk, a city 600 miles east of Moscow.
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Convicts Thought to be from Wagner Group Escape in Ukraine
- Six convicts escaped from a training camp in Ukraine run by the Wagner Group.
- Russian authorities posted leaflets around Rostov-on-Don warning residents.
- The men were thought to have escaped on 22 December.
- They are likely from the new batch of recruits specifically signed up from prisons.
- Head of the Wagner Group, Progizhin, toured remote prisons in Russia to recruit drug dealers and murderers.
- In November of 2022, the Wagner Group released a video where one of their fighters was smashing in the head of a deserter with a sledgehammer. (Note: They have also mailed a sledgehammer to officials.)
- Prigozhin praised the video.
- Prigozhin said about the escapes: ““Many villains are being detained whom you don’t even need to know about. So sleep well.””
- The Wagner Group has been accused of human rights abuses in the Middle East and in Africa where they also functioned as proxies for the Russians.
- A mercenary was arrested in Rostov in December after escaping.
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Sunday News Notes:
Ukraine
- Founder of Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, challenges Putin.
- Prigozhin praised Ukrainian president, Zelensky, on his social media platform.
- “Although he is the president of a country that’s hostile to Russia right now, Zelensky is a strong, confident, pragmatic and nice guy,”
- In a second post, Prigozhin followed up with a warning: “Don’t underestimate him.” The second post was described by the Telegraph as “explaining why he was offering such a discordant view of” Zelensky.
- Prigozhin holds no formal role with the Russian government, but his position has increased in importance as he has funneled more and more soldiers into Ukraine fighting for Russia.
- His statement is not in line with the Kremlin presentation of Zelensky as a drug-addled Nazi. And, it is not the first time Prigozhin has challenged Putin. Earlier he questioned the military’s conduct of the war.
- The Washington Post reported that Prigozhin along with Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, has become more vocal in their criticisms of military leaders prosecuting Putin’s war.
- According to the Telegraph: “British lawyers McCue Jury and Partners on Tuesday announced they were bringing legal action against Wagner for “terrorism” in Ukraine, aiming to claim compensation for victims of the mercenary group”
- Prigozhin was filmed in September of 2022 recruiting soldiers in Russian prisons. He promised them they would be freed is they survived six months in Ukraine. He also promised they would be shot if they tried to desert.
- “In another public message, he defended recruiting rapists and murders on the basis that it meant “your sons” would not be sent to the front. Weeks later Putin announced a mobilisation that has sent around 300,000 extra men to war.”
- Telegraph: “The Institute for the Study of War in its latest report on Tuesday said that Mr Prigozhin was “establishing himself as a political force, using his popular status and his affiliation with Wagner to criticise his opponents within elite circles”.
- In testimony to British parliament on Tuesday, Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky confirmed reports of Mr Prigozhin’s special place in Putin’s court, describing him as a “significant tool for the Kremlin”.
- “The number of meetings with the dictator is the only currency that’s in demand in that regime, and Mr Prigozhin has got a lot of those meetings,” said Mr Khodorkovsky, who was released after a decade in Russian prison in 2013, and was formerly the country’s richest man.”
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To combat endemic corruption, the Russian government usually requires senior officials to make annual declarations of assets and incomes. But the new decree, signed by Mr. Putin on Thursday and backdated to the start of the invasion, exempts Russian officials in the occupied territories from normal restrictions on receiving outside financial contributions — which some military analysts interpreted as giving cover to corruption or the seizure of private property.
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www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/world/europe/orthodox-church-ukraine-russia.html
Andriy Pavlenko, an Orthodox church abbot….was working actively to kill Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian activists, including a priest from a rival Orthodox church in his city, Sievierodonetsk
He needs to be killed,” he wrote of the rival priest, according to evidence introduced at his trial in a Ukrainian court, showing he had sent lists to the Russian Army of people to round up once the city was occupied. Mr. Pavlenko was convicted as a spy this month and then traded with Russia in a prisoner exchange.
nyt://image/200a7ddd-f4ab-509e-a8c1-cccc4696a5f3
His was hardly an isolated case. In the past month, the authorities have arrested or publicly identified as suspects more than 30 clergymen and nuns of the Ukrainian arm of the Russian Orthodox Church.
To the Ukrainian security services, the Russian-aligned church, one of the country’s two major Orthodox churches, poses a uniquely subversive threat — a widely trusted institution that is not only an incubator of pro-Russia sentiment but is also infiltrated by priests, monks and nuns who have aided Russia in the war
The Russian Orthodox Church is in reality a tool of Russian aggression,” Archbishop Yevstratiy, a spokesman for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, said in an interview in the St. Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery in Kyiv.
Outside military analysts have seen reason for Ukraine’s concern. The church of the Moscow Patriarchate “materially supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based analytical group, wrote in a research note on the role of the Russian-affiliated church in the war.
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SATURDAY 31 DECEMBER 2022
Morning News Notes:
Ukraine
- Russia has launched New Year’s Day strikes on Ukraine.
- A concert hall in central Kyiv was damaged.
- An elderly man was killed in an explosion after a missile strike in Kyiv.
- The Russians are firing missiles from the Caspian Sea.
- The Alfavito Hotel in downtown Kyiv was hit.
- Explosions reported in Zaporizhzhia.
- Several regions preventatively cut off power amid the ongoing missile attack.
- Air raid alerts are going off in most Ukrainian regions.
- Zelensky: “We will liberate our land. We will win this war.”
- Explosions in occupied Crimea’s Dzhankoy and Yevpatoria.
- Residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia were damaged in an attack.
- At least three explosions in Kyiv.
- The New York Times has published an article about the problem of sabotage and spying from within the Orthodox Russian Church. (www.lawpowerandjustice.com)
- Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson was ranting a few weeks ago about how Zelensky was trying to eliminate “religion” in Ukraine. He played a taped video where Patriarch Kirill claimed that Ukraine was waging a “war against God.”
- Telegraph podcast journalists (Ukraine: The Latest) were talking about what a threat it was to Putin that there was a Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine where Ukrainians worshipped and also supported Ukrainian independence from Russia. Many Russians have left the Russian Orthodox Church since the war.
- Last week, Russia tried but failed to black out Kyiv power for New Year’s.
Sources:
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MORNING NEWS STORIES
Suspicious Russian Oligarch Deaths
Wagner Group
PMC Wagner Group: The notorious private army
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