Lesson Five – Russia Sovereignty and Survival

Lesson 5 – Russia: national survival, tradition, patriotism

‘Patriotism is love of one’s country. Nationalism is hatred of others’ – Putin

In the 1990’s Russia suffered severe economic conditions, chronic corruption, a protracted Islamist insurgency, and the real prospect of national disintegration. Russia’s critical infrastructure, oil and gas interests were in private hands. The military was dramatically shrunk, poorly led, poorly trained, and poorly equipped. The country was largely controlled by the ‘oligarchs’ or crony capitalists who had enriched themselves from the spoils of the former USSR. Life expectancy was low and social and economic indicators placed Russia as a second world country. Russia’s two primary concerns therefore were and are economic growth and sovereignty.

In the country there were broadly two factions. A pro-western faction representing the Oligarchs and a handful of Western sympathisers, and a nationalist faction representing the military, security services, and much of the Russian heartland. Putin won the Presidency representing the nationalist faction. Medvedev won the Prime Ministership representing the pro-Western faction. For the last 15 years the two leaders have maintained national stability. Putin has balanced both factions while expanding the influence of his own by direct popular appeal. While the Oligarchs have for the most part kept their interests, Putin succeeded in nationalising much of Russia’s oil and gas reserves to the great chagrin of Western leaders, capitalists, and press. The means whereby this was achieved may have been dubious but the resultant revenue stream sustained 15 years of economic growth and lifted the country out of poverty. This revenue also made possible the re-establishment and modernisation of the armed forces. Russia is now able to protect its territorial integrity and assert itself in world affairs. However, to maintain economic growth the economy needs to diversify and for that to happen Russia needs investment and exchange with the West.

Putin consistently courted Europe, proposing a single economic union from Berlin to Vladivostok and committing to work towards EU standards for various export goods. A deeper economic relationship between Russia and the EU would bring prosperity and development to the peoples of the Russian Federation and Europe including Eastern Europe. It would make Russia a strong, independent, and regionally powerful player.

…enter the NeoCons

This was and is entirely unacceptable to Washington. The Neocons were now in power in Washington and Mr Wolfowitz, having been instrumental in bringing about the invasion of Iraq, had already penned the Wolfowitz doctrine.[1] Quote:

The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defence areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

The difficulty Wolfowitz and his ideological fellow travellers face is that Russia has the biggest, most modern, and best managed nuclear forces in the world;[2] and had has made clear that they will use them and all other necessary means if their survival as a sovereign country is in jeopardy.[3]  Specifically Russian nuclear doctrine states:

The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use against her and (or) her allies of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, as well as in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons in a way which would threaten her very existence as a state. The decision to use nuclear weapons is taken by the President of the Russian Federation.[4]

What to do?

Since Russia as a unified State cannot be defeated, Washington’s strategy turned to fracturing the Russian Federation and cutting it off from allies, finance, and trade. This strategy kicked off with a popular uprising in Ukraine in February 2014.

Ukraine is an Eastern European nation of approximately 45 million that is deeply culturally, economically, and historically entwined with Russia. The nearest equivalent I could think of in the West would be the relationship between Scotland and England. Ukraine has been variously ruled by the Tsars and the USSR, but chose not to join the Russian Federation after the USSR dissolved. Nevertheless, Crimea remained closely tied to Russia; hosting the Russian Black Sea fleet, having a majority of Russian speakers, and having an agreement with Ukraine to host up to 15 thousand Russian troops at any time. Essentially, Russia allowed Crimea to be part of Ukraine on the understanding that Ukraine would look after Russia’s strategic interests in Crimea. In Eastern Ukraine a majority of the population speaks and is ethnically Russian.

Ukraine is a complex society. There is a strong faction which sees the country’s future as part of the EU, there is a faction which wishes the country to remain in Russia’s orbit, there are extreme Ukrainian nationalists who want to rid the country of other ethnic groups, and there are openly Neo Nazi groups whose history traces back to collaboration with the German Nazis in World War Two. These later two openly hate Russians.[i]

In late 2013 popular protests began against the Russian leaning President. Initially the ‘Maidan’ protest movement sought closer ties to the West, an end to endemic corruption, and less perceived meddling by Russia in Ukraine’s future. This civil strife morphed into a low level civil war and then a coup which toppled the President and installed a pro-Western oligarch. To what extent these events arose internally is not clear, but what is clear is that the US State Department became deeply involved in the coup. Specifically, the US State Department spent one billion US dollars sponsoring opposition groups and US officials were physically present on the ground during the latter period of the coup. It appears that the US took control of the coup at some point. Russian phone intercepts record US State Department representative Victoria Nuland discussing and in effect deciding who would be in the new Cabinet.[ii] Shortly after the coup, national elections installed Poroshenko as President. Poroshenko has consistently sought NATO membership, EU membership, and NATO military support against Russia. In response Putin mobilised a quarter of a million troops and stationed them within striking distance of the border.

Ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine refused to recognise the new government and began forming militia. Unconventional military forces from Russia began infiltrating across the border into East Ukraine. These were the famous ‘little green men.’ Poroshenko sent the Ukrainian army against the rebels but much of the army in effect mutinied, refusing to turn their tanks on fellow Russian speakers. In the confused weeks that followed Poroshenko lost control of the armed forces. The Azov battalion and other nationalist groups took the fight to resisting towns and villages in East Ukraine. Tales of massacres and cruelty followed. A million people fled across the border to Russia. This was barely mentioned in the Western press. Russia for its part accepted them and supplied cross border humanitarian aid. In the interim two parts of East Ukraine, Novorussia and Donbas, declared independence, and the civil war began in earnest.

Civil War Contained

Russia now faced a humanitarian tragedy on its border, an ethnic cleansing campaign directed towards ethnic Russians, and the acquisition by NATO of its vital military assets in Crimea. In light of this Russia faced the following choices:

• Abandon the Russian populations of East Ukraine and Crimea to their fate
• Provide covert aid to the rebels
• Invade Ukraine
• Recognise and defend Novorussia and Donbas
• Hold Crimea

Russia’s response was decisive but unpredicted by the West. Firstly, Russia conducted a free referendum within Crimea in accordance with international norms. The population of Crimea voted by a clear majority to join with Russia. The Russian troops who were already legally in Crimea stayed. Ukrainian loyalist forces stood down and sovereignty transferred to the Russian Federation.

Russia did not invade Ukraine. If Russia had invaded Ukraine their tanks would have driven to the Czech’ border within 72 hours and Russian aircraft would have been flying over Kiev.[5] Nor did Russia lend its military to the rebels. If it had done so the Rebels would have rapidly expanded their territory much farther and with fewer casualties. Rather, Russia provided just enough military support to the rebels to allow them to stop the Ukrainian forces, secure a modest territory, and prevent an ethnic bloodbath. This took the form of modern mobile artillery, a modest number of tanks, special forces, and drones.[6]

This modest assistance also allowed a degree of plausible denial. While Russian State media consistently denied that Russian forces were in Ukraine, Western media were hysterical in pretending that there was a Russian invasion of Crimea and Ukraine. At base, both lied.

Having effectively defeated the Ukrainian armed forces the rebels were eager to expand their territory and could have done so. At this point Putin intervened, insisting on a negotiated cease fire and an end to hostilities. Despite opposition from Washington, Germany and Russia both agreed to support a negotiated end to the rebel advance. These became known as the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 accords. While both sides continue to fire light and heavy weapons across the demarcation line, the rebel advance has halted in accordance with these agreements.

Russia thus achieved its key objectives in the conflict – keep Crimea, avoid being drawn into a major conflict, create a buffer zone between it and a militaristic pro NATO force, and prevent an ethnic cleansing campaign of Russians.

Move and Counter Move

The response from the United States was both hysterical and calculated. In the media narrative Putin became a dictator who had invaded a newly independent Ukraine and was about to go on a military rampage across Eastern Europe, even threatening Western Europe. Putin must be ‘got rid of’ and Russia tamed.

Russian actions were used to frighten small Eastern European countries into the NATO orbit with joint exercises and military purchases. More significantly, a raft of economic sanctions was imposed on Russia targeted to cause maximum economic damage. This included a concerted attempt to harm the Russian economy by blocking access to the SWIFT exchange. Additional sanctions aimed at cutting European business off from Russia and harming the Russian economy.

Recall that sanctions were used to weaken Iraq prior to invasion, and the US has repeatedly declared its intention to invade Iran which is currently subject to sanctions. This lesson was not lost on Putin. In response Russia imposed its own sanctions on Europe, began substituting for imports, paid off its loans, turned to China, and show-cased its modern military capabilities in Syria.

Washington meanwhile proposed that Siberia should break from the Russian Federation, and coordinated major military exercises on Russia’s border to defend against the supposed ‘Russian threat’. This has included major naval drills in the Black Sea within easy firing distance of Russian military facilities. The US and its Atlantic allies Canada and Britain, wasted no opportunity to accuse or belittle Russia in every imaginable way in every imaginable forum, most recently by attempting to ban the entire Russian Olympic team. George Soros and the US State Department have sought to undermine the current Russian power structure by pouring money into NGO’s within Russia.

Putin responded by regulating foreign NGO’s and forming a political alliance with the Russia Orthodox church. This has positioned him firmly within the Russian spiritual and cultural heartland and strengthened his popular support. In parallel he has created national movement, the ‘All-Russia Peoples’ Front (ONF),[7] and a youth movement that can be activated in the event of a Maidan style revolt in Russia.[8] Allying with the Orthodox church positions Putin to reach out to the leaders and populations of Orthodox countries including Greece, in order to draw them closer to Russia’s orbit and if possible, create an Orthodox axis that can act independently of the EU.

Putin continues to describe Western and American leaders as ‘partners’ and is clearly playing the long game – sharing the pain of sanctions, refusing to accept Syrian migrants, and waiting for the Europeans to come to their senses. The Russian leadership had already created an alternative media/informational space within the West, most notably via flagship channel ‘Russia Today’.

On the military front Russia is increasing military preparedness, undertaking mass mobilisations, snap drills, tactical drills, and major exercises by its nuclear forces. In other words, it is practicing and rehearsing for invasion. Despite official denials from across the Atlantic, Russian forces claim to have commandeered and to have shot down a number of American military drones that were flying over Crimea. In that sense the shooting war between the US and Russia may have already began.[9]

The War in Syria is occurring in this context. The CIA is well positioned to send Islamic terrorists against the Southern Russian states in the same manner in which they have sent terrorists against Syria. Russia in turn has hardened her southern flank with increased military and intelligence activity and threatened to target Western intelligence operatives in Syria. All the chess pieces are now in play and all are moving.

OK that’s the short version. What do we learn from these events?

Firstly, both the Russian establishment and the Russian people now understand that their struggle for national sovereignty against the United States is an existential struggle.[10] When people face existential threats they gather around strong leaders. This is one reason why Putin enjoys over eighty per cent popular support.

Secondly, both sides are playing the long game. This will be a decades long struggle. We should at a minimum expect a serious attempt at fostering civil war within Russia based on ethnic and religious differences, most probably among the Islamic populations of southern Russia. At a maximum we can expect a tactical nuclear exchange with a high likelihood of escalation.

The election of Donald Trump as US President had the potential to significantly de-rail the Neocon strategy of confrontation and dismemberment of Russia. A President was elected on a policy platform of normalising relations with Russia, getting out of foreign conflicts, and investing in the Russian economy. Following the election the CIA moved swiftly to mobilise the left against Trump while conducting a psychological operation to undermine the Presidency by creating false narrative about ‘Russian Hacking’. Elements of this are discussed and dissected in the free materials on the site and much has been written about it elsewhere. Suffice to say that these efforts were successful in preventing a re-set of relations, and the President is clearly not in control of the foreign policy of the United States of America. Recently the United State government listed Russia Today ‘RT’ news channel as a ‘foreign agent’ after which the Russian government listed nine new organisations as ‘foreign agents’ including ‘Voice of America’ and ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

One by-product of this campaign against peace, prosperity and democracy, is that the Russian Chiefs of Staff have concluded, perhaps correctly, that the US is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The continued existence of life on earth now depends on their threat assessment and level of restraint.

We are all at Risk

Should we care? I believe we should for several reasons. Firstly, the world is now in the cross hairs of a nuclear exchange; civilization is at risk and life on earth is at risk. This is completely unnecessary and is entirely the result of the primal urge to rule the world by America’s ruling class. Secondly, because American support for Islamic terrorism and national destabilisation threatens the security of every Western country. Russia in that sense, is a natural ally.

And now a final note about the Russian leadership. You may love or hate Putin, but like it or not, he is the democratically elected leader of the Russian people. However, Putin will not live forever and he will not be President of Russia forever. The Western establishment has invested so much energy into demonising the elected President of a democratic country that they now see Putin as an evil dictator and imagine that his removal will make room for a more cooperative leader. There is another possibility. Having endured a quarter century of insult, humiliation and aggression[11], the Russian people might install a leader who is far less balanced, insightful and moderate than Putin.[iii] That person will be in charge of a modern military, a supportive populace, and a vast nuclear arsenal. Be careful what you wish for.

[1] See further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine

[2] See here: http://in.rbth.com/blogs/stranger_than_fiction/2015/11/30/world-war-iii-why-rusia-will-bury-the-west_545807

[3] For a cautionary post on why provoking Russia is a bad idea see here: http://thesaker.is/how-russia-is-preparing-for-wwiii/

[4] Source: http://thesaker.is/week-nineteen-of-the-russian-intervention-in-syria-would-russia-use-nukes-to-defend-khmeimim/ See further: http://thesaker.is/a-russian-warning/

[5] For a rather humorous explanation of what a Russian ‘invasion’ would actually look like see here: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/how-can-you-tell-whether-russia-has.html

[6] See here for a sample analysis of the technology provided to Donbas armed forces and their tactical effect: https://southfront.org/orlan-10-uavs-in-action-against-ukrainian-artillery/

[7] See further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Russia_People%27s_Front

[8] See further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashi_(youth_movement) and here: http://mashable.com/2016/01/06/putin-drokova-russia-new-york/#wXYY2bQP7qq4

[9] See further: https://youtu.be/NvOjaASQZBY

[10] http://www.ridus.ru/news/185134  For an English language explanation see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PgSX-WD96Q&feature=youtu.be

[11] Actually this has been the dominant Western world attitude to Russian since the middle ages but we are discussing recent events.

Materials

[i]  Members of the Ukrainian Azov battalion sport the ‘Wolftrap’ Nazi symbol that dates to the alliance between Ukrainian and German Nazis in World War II. The Azov battalion fought against separatists and is implicated in numerous abuses.

Putin rides with the ‘Night Wolves’ gang that fought on the side of Russian nationalists in Ukraine.

Clinton Plans to Destroy Russia

[ii] Source: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/clinton-plans-destroy-russia/ri16207

These were two of the emails that the State Department marked «Confidential» after Hillary’s blatantly illegal (but not even investigated by the FBI) privatized State Department email operation became public, and both emails were then rated by the State Department as being appropriate to declassify only on 19 February 2036. Both of them demonstrate that while Hillary was Secretary of State, her husband, «Bill», was very actively assisting her «diplomacy». Both notes are from Jeffrey Feltman, who subsequently became prominently mentioned by the US State Department’s Victoria Nuland when Nuland told the US Ambassador in Kiev, on 4 February 2014, just 18 days prior to her coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine, and 22 days prior to installation of the Russia-hating Arseniy Yatsenyuk to lead the US interim dictatorship there, the following:

Exhibit #3:

Victoria Nuland: I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the – What he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in, he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.

Geoffrey Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. OK. Good. Do you want us to set up a call with him as the next step?

Victoria Nuland: My understanding from that call – but you tell me – was that the big three were going into their own meeting and that Yats was going to offer in that context a three-plus-one conversation or three-plus-two with you. Is that not how you understood it?

Pyatt: No. I think – I mean that’s what he proposed but I think, just knowing the dynamic that’s been with them where Klitschko has been the top dog, he’s going to take a while to show up for whatever meeting they’ve got and he’s probably talking to his guys at this point, so I think you reaching out directly to him helps with the personality management among the three and it gives you also a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn’t like it.

Nuland: OK, good. I’m happy. Why don’t you reach out to him and see if he wants to talk before or after.

Pyatt: OK, will do. Thanks.

Nuland: OK, one more wrinkle for you Geoff. I can’t remember if I told you this, or if I only told Washington this, that when I talked to Jeff Feltman [who had, in 2011, been in Hillary’s State Department, but was now the U.N.’s Under Secretary-General – immediately under Ban ki-Moon – for Political Affairs] this morning, he had a new name for the U.N. guy Robert Serry did I write you that this morning?…

In other words, Feltman, who had been central in the operation to overthrow one leader who was friendly toward Russia, Assad (to replace him there by jihadists); was now prominently involved also in the operation to overthrow another leader friendly toward Russia, Yanukovych (to replace him there by Nazis) (and Russia, of course, cannot tolerate either jihadists or Nazis, so it tries to eliminate both). (And, on 21 November 2014, the US was one of only 3 countries at the U.N. voting against a resolution to condemn resurgent Nazism and holocaust-denial. The new, Nazi, Americanized, Ukraine, was another of the three internationally pro-Nazi regimes.)

In exhibits 1 and 2, Feltman’s counsel has been sought by Hillary regarding whether she should receive Bill’s assistance in setting up a discussion with «Saud», who might have been King Saud, or else it was his #2, the Crown Prince, whom Bill personally knew.

It’s important to note that Exhibits 1 and 2 are from 20 February 2011, which was right before the demonstrations started against the Syrian secular regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Wikipedia’s article «Syrian Civil War» says «The protests began on 15 March 2011,» and so those two exhibits, both dated 20 February 2011, predated the «protests» in Syria by exactly 23 days.

[iii] I know many people will object to this characterisation, but here we need to refer to objective systemic behaviours. When dealing with foreign crisis Putin has consistently allowed the crisis to develop, then intervened at the last moment to the least extent necessary to secure Russia’s minimum strategic interests, then sought a negotiated solution. This was the approach taken in Georgia/Ossetia, Crimea, East Ukraine, and Syria. This approach has allowed Russia to avoid being drawn into major conflicts, and has allowed Putin to maintain political unity within Russia. The obvious exception here is the Chechen war which threatened a breakup of the Russian Federation and required a decisive military response.

Hybrid War

The following article explores some aspects of the current hybrid war on Russia. A ‘hybrid war’ is one that occurs without a declaration of war and over multiple domains. It includes economic sanctions, other forms of economic sabotage, subversive diplomacy, isolating the target and cutting it off from allies, propaganda and psychological operations, regime change, colour revolution, assassination, and the creation of division, confusion and opposition groups in the target society. This article makes a number of assertions about aspects of the hybrid war on Russia. 3P Training makes no assertions as to the truth or accuracy of these claims. The reader is encourage to make this a starting point for their own inquiry and draw their own conclusions. It is however an example of what citizenship investigation can uncover.

Note that many articles are in Russian and require translation. This can be done to some extent using online tools.

Adapted from: http://thesaker.is/scotts-answer-to-an-email-from-a-grid-dymanics-employee/

Article by Scott Humor

• author of The enemy of the State
• Director of Research and Development at The Saker Analytical site

Concerning so called “non-systemic opposition” and foreign entities including the Grid Dynamics interference in Russia’s presidential election

Here, on thesaker.is we have accumulated a large body of research on the “color revolution” methods and evidence that so called “the fifth column” and “non-systemic opposition” to the Russian state are in fact agents of the foreign governments, military and secret services. We published our researches into use of false flag attacks and snipers. If you don’t trust our opinions, you can simply read the diplomatic dispatches demonstrating how the “liberal non-systemic opposition” in Russia and Belarus directly linked to the United State government.

• A diplomatic dispatch the US Ambassador met with Belarusian pro-democracy activists living in exile in Estonia, filed on September 2007.
• In 1996-1997, Milinkevich represented the Belarusian Soros Foundation in Grodno.
• OPPOSITION CHOOSES SINGLE CANDIDATE, 2005 October 3
• Belarus opposition meeting with the US senators

In my article on the Grid Dynamics I described the history and ownership of the company. There is no doubt that it’s an U.S. based company that recently was acquired by a Chinese entity, which makes this company being a foreign company.

According to Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Russian government haven been seeking a reciprocal non-interference with the U.S. in each other’s internal affairs within the framework of the law for nearly a century. Among examples of such interference of so called Western states are “voice their opinions, criticizing everything linked with the elections, from legislation to procedural issues,” by the illegal economic and political sanctions and restrictions.

“In late December, Putin said foreign security agencies are “doing all they can to ramp up their level of activity in Russia,” targeting the country’s social and political life. A month before that, the president warned that “in response to our alleged interference in their election, [the Americans] want to create problems with the presidential vote in Russia.”

According to unnamed diplomatic sources, ” Ukrainian radical organizations will try “with double vigor to disrupt the polling” for citizens of Russia, who currently reside in Ukraine, to vote at the Presidential elections in Russia

A memorandum dedicated to Washington’s long-standing and systemic aspirations to influence the developments in Russia in its own interests was handed over to US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman on December 21, 2017.

As I wrote in my article, the YouCon conference that had gathered 1200 students from all over the country was used as a platform to arrange meetings with a representative of Soros/ Khodorkovsky/Sobchak.

The Grid Dynamics is a foreign entity that is actively interfering into the Russian presidential election.

The irony of it all seems to be lost on managers and employees of the GD. You are a foreign company. You arranged meeting between 1200 Russian college students and a director of non-systemic opposition headquarter that serves interests of foreign entities, like notorious George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, the Open Russia, a anti-Russian foreign based organization founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Sobchak, a non-systemic anti-Russia personality, whose hate speech I quoted above.

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For the past twenty-five years, Russia’s science has been suffering from an ongoing and sustained war on scientists. In the 1990s, 800 science research institutions were closed, and thousands of scientists were left with no jobs and no community. By some estimates, about 800,000 people with science degrees left the country in the last quarter of century.

Currently, several dozens of Russian Academy of Science members live and work in the West. Those scientists who refused to leave were threatened and about one hundred were killed in what clearly has been a systematic black op.

Most of the murders have never been solved. Here you can find a compilation of names of murdered scientists and circumstances of their death from 2001 to 2010:

A hunt on Russia’s scientists sheds some light into the past and explains why Stalin kept the country’s best minds under protection, in closed secret research centers. At the time, it was truly the only way to protect them. I don’t think we would have Korolev, Tupolev, and Kalashnikov to work as long and productively as they did if they lived as private citizens who were targets of foreign security services and the followers of Trotsky.

Back to Alexander Trekov, who was noticed as a university student with his groundbreaking research on autonomous vehicles. There were rumors that he was killed because of his work, and the perpetrators were never found, despite of the security cameras footage obtained by the police, which points to a planned professional hit by someone who knew Trekov’s schedule, the Saratov streets he walked home, and the location of security cameras in the area.

The second time the Grid Dynamics company’s name came up was during research for my book “Pokémons in Ukraine.” I was composing profiles of the Blue Team crisis actors, the so called “Ukrainian pro-EU patriots,” and was crosschecking them with the Red Team Crisis actors, the so called “pro-Russia rebels.” The fact is that some crisis actors changed teams and went back and forth, and I was trying to map their movements. On one video of “pro-Russian rebels” a woman managing a staged protest looked exactly like one of the managers of the Help-Army NGO, that assisted the Kiev regime death battalions in 2014.

I checked the backgrounds of some of the people in the video, trying to get evidence that this woman was in Donetsk in the spring of 2014. That’s how I found that another person on the video, Yulia Rudanovska, worked for the Grid Dynamics, and my first thought was, “Wait a minute, isn’t it the same company where a young promising engineer was killed? He was developing technology for driverless cars.”

I am describing my research process in such detail to show that my article wasn’t an assignment, but something organically grown from my other research. So, again, I don’t get paid for my articles.

The Grid Dynamic largely contributed to the loss of talented software developers and engineers.

Grid Dynamics International, Inc. has filed 109 labor condition applications for H1B visa and 17 labor certifications for green card from fiscal year 2014 to 2016.

Grid Dynamics International, Inc., Jobs & Salary for Foreign Workers …

I found that the company pays about 100,000 rubles a month to its system engineers in Russia, which is approximately $1750 a months. About $20,000 a year, which is a fraction of what they pay to specialists who agree to relocate to the U.S.

The practice of unequal pay within same company is not just used by the U.S. based companies in Russia, but also across the European Union member states. Per industry insider, the main reason IT people are “defecting” to the US is because they get higher salaries there. For example in Damore’s lawsuit against Google he talks about a 150,000 USD per year in stock option bonus (that doesn’t include his base salary). Some specialists who went to the US confirming it was the case (they still came back, though, mostly because they didn’t like the mentality).

The practice of unequal pay based on a geographic location of an IT specialist is a coercive mechanism to make highly valuable specialists to move to the United States, and also a wealth transfer mechanism, considering that due to being paid less, specialists based in Russia pay less in taxes, and they will have smaller pensions down the road, which in turn places additional pressure on the country’s social security baseline.

What happens when people arrive to the US? I wrote about the Russian programmer Sergey Aleynikov, jailed by Goldman Sachs, here,  here, and here. He was jailed on made up charges merely for wanting to quit Goldman Sachs, and to work for a company that would pay him ten times more. Goldman Sachs pulled some strings and showed him, and all other Russian specialists, that they were slaves who weren’t allowed to quit their owners. Kris Kaspersky or Nikolay Likhachev, a software developer who worked for the US government program of malware detection, and who died reportedly after jumping off a plane, even so no footage of his jump was on airport surveillance cameras, and no other jumpers remembered him to be on a plane in February 2017. We know that the US government kidnaps programmers from Russia and jails them for ridiculous frivolous charges. According to a wife of one of them, he was offered to work for the US government in his professional capacity against Russia in exchange for freedom.

There is a steady flow of information of sudden violent deaths of Russians working in the US or visiting the country. Anton Yelchin, a Hollywood actor, died in an apparent accident in 2016. Anton Kemaev, a father of three children, was killed in Pittsburg in December 2017.  Artem S. Ziberov, a high school student, was killed in June 2017 in Maryland. “Nine months, nine prominent Russians dead,” victoriously declared CNN in August 2017. “Nine high-profile Russians, including several high-profile diplomats, have died over the nine months since the US presidential election on November 8.”

When people managing the US security agencies and military say that they have to kill as many Russians as they can, it’s not an empty threat, but rather their way to reveal their plans.

Add to this a growing civil unrest inside the America’s biggest companies. In short, the companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google are punishing voters for electing Trump by demonetizing their content channels. YouTube did this and Facebook shut down millions of accounts of users, mostly some brilliant individuals, stay at home moms, disabled and retired people, who managed to make a living using those platforms. It has been a devastating hit for many families, and now a wave of backlash is coming. Many people working for those companies are not Trotskists. A Facebook engineer had his house burned down,  after he publicly spoke about infighting in FB between so called “democrats” and the realists, who understand that the company is wreaking havoc in society. Facebook is terrified to have Mark Zuckerberg speak to the Congress.

A Twitter employee brags that sitting behind his keyboard, he can shut the President of America down, to stop him communicating with millions of his constituents and with outside world.  They did this once, but brought back Trump’s tweeter account in ten minutes. Can you imagine this level of hubris, delusion and separation from reality if a Tweeter employee says that the President’s free speech is his hands?

This kind of provocations spells troubles mostly for people who work for those companies. Now imagine to be a specialist from Russia and getting cutup in this shitstorm, considering that both sides, socialists and conservatives, are brainwashed to hate the Russians. Say, you work for Google and your manager is a black woman, who hates you for being white male and double hates you for being Russian who, in her mind, “helped to elect Trump.” She would do anything in her power to turn your life into living hell. She can even mastermind a false flag attack to frame you for some kind of company policy violation, or worse.

Considering the situation, it’s still hard to prevent talented educated people from trying something new and signing up to work for the American companies. They might not even be aware what cesspool they are getting into.

Russia’s IT specialists and engineers are not protected on the international professional labor market. They are forced to negotiate as individuals, with no bargaining power behind them. The government  cannot do this for them. Looking at pictures of talented intelligent Russian children taking part in your latest YouCon, and, in my opinion, being manipulated, used and thrown to the American sharks, makes me worried sick for them.

They need a professional union organization that would negotiate their contacts, with lawyers that would look after their interests and also after the interest of the country that invests so much resources to educate them into specialists who are in high demand worldwide. This organization also should be able to assist young scientists in getting funds to start their own companies.

There is a need to create an IT students union that would do same as a professional union, but in relation to students traveling and visiting schools and conferences in other countries. These two organization, not for profit NGOs, would watch over the specialists who work abroad making sure that they are safe. They should be staffed with people familiar with labor laws in deferent countries, capable of negotiating contracts to get the highest  pay possible, people who have direct contacts with the country’s law enforcement, and with the legal firms abroad  to be used in the worst case scenario. These organizations should have enough funds available to pay for legal defense.

Believe me, it’s much harder to threaten, harass, underpay and mistreat someone who is represented by lawyers from a big organization, then an individual who has no legal support.   

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President Putin said during his meeting with the representatives of the Russia’s liberal media: “after some time any commodity will be digitized and occupy its place on such information digital platforms that it will be impossible to produce or upgrade anything without using information from these platforms. Those who own these platforms will rule the world.”

Now imagine that an IT company whose founders, managers and employees directly and indirectly involved in the regime change business, embeds itself into this unified Eurasian platform via its employees developed codes. All it takes is one or two lines of codes burred inside 1000s pages of script, configured to trigger some catastrophic event when a certain date or conditions are achieved.

Here, I found an illustration of my thesis that .ru emails extensions are being used by the IT specialist physically located in other countries.

This based on an email from the HBGary company, the US government contractor, published by the Wikileaks, and appropriately titled “Holy Shit Dude – MalwareDomainList offers their full db (database) as a free DL (download).”

https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails/emailid/56319

From:  Shawn Bracken, the  Principal Research Scientist HBGary, Inc. shawn@hbgary.com To: greg@hbgary.com Date: 2011-01-13 06:56 Subject: Holy Shit Dude – MalwareDomainList offers their full db as a free DL

“58k+ rows of blacklist candidates attached. There is literally 10’s of thousands of great blacklist domains, IP subnets, admin contacts etc to get us started all in this little 8.5mb CSV file. I could even load/use this list in its literal format in about 30 minutes of CSV parser coding if I wanted. (although in actuality I’ll probably have the Master box parse/convert to a native HBG/Razor config format which is what will get distributed to the slave razor apps.) BONUS: They also have an RSS feed you hit that we can have the Master hit that will give us just the hourly/daily updates of whats new. With the help of a few great sources like this our OSINT pimp-hand will be very strong. Thanks for the clue on checking out malwaredomainlist. :P”

Open a file in attachment at https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails/emailid/56319

Take a look at what is listed under numbers #6028 and #6029: zeus v1 config file for Zeus Bot. Zbot is a banking Trojan that also goes by the names Zeus, WSNPOEM, NTOS and PRG. Once the Trojan is downloaded onto your computer, it runs in the background recording every keystroke your computer makes. Take a look at item called “Blade2009” with email www2@open.by.

An email is based in Belarus, but an IP: 92.60.176.41is owned by a Ukrainian company wnet.ua, located in Odessa.

Operating from the territory of Ukraine.

If you search the file with a keyword “.ru” you will find out that many of the hackers operating with .ru mail extension were, actually, operating from UA (Ukraine)and US (the United States.)

Another example, “Anton Nikiforov” (same@bz3.ru) items #56341, 56342, 56343, 56344 operated from the US, under #56350 and further, the same ID hacker appeared to be operating from alternately China and Ukraine. Say, this is a Pentagon contractor with employees based on the US military bases around the world, or an international company with subcontractors located in deferent locations.

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Concerning matters of free speech

Different countries have different, and sometimes opposite understanding what the “freedom of speech” encompasses. In Germany, for example, any criticism of the state of Israel is considered to be a hateful speech and is punished by incarceration.

In 2017, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas championed the measure that fines  Facebook, Twitter and other outlets up to $53 million (50 million euros) if they failed to remove hate speech and other forms of illegal content, this is known as the German Hate Speech Laws and it dictates for the social media users to be a subject to a range of punishments for posting material, including a prison sentence of up to five years for what “may” amount to threats, hate speech, defamation, or incitement to commit a crime, among other offenses.

Britain has something similar called the Public Order Act under which people being arrested and jailed on merely “suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred.”

In my view, the United State and Russia have the most freedom of speech of all countries. Although, in case of the MSM, the freedom of speech is being severally reduced by actions of the privately owned social media platforms. They also report directly to the U.S. secret services, as an undercover video appears to show Twitter security engineer saying that Twitter keeps all deleted direct messages and Tweets in case they need to hand them over to the government at a later date.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/951310420224167936

Granted all of the above, you have to understand that in, so called, Western countries, attacks on people for having a different ethnic identity is a hate speech.

Kseniya Sobchak once notoriously stated that “Russians are genetic waste.” Her other equally notorious statement she made during her interview to a reporter of the Novaya Gazeta Alexander Nikonov in 2005. She said, “I love Jews, because all Russians are cattle.”

I don’t know about you, but I am a Russian, and  I absolutely disagree with her notion.  In addition, this kind of racist remarks about Russians is not a “free speech.” It’s a hate speech.

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Concerning some Grid Dynamics employees, who took part in the war against civilian population of Donbass.

The claims these people make that they were fighting in an “ATO” (Anti-Terror Operation) have just been rejected by the Ukrainian government.

On January 16, 2018 the Parliament of Ukraine, Rada, has refused to recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk republics as the “terrorist organizations.”

We, at thesaker.is, have generated a huge body of work dedicated to the Ukrainian war. In 2015-2016 we had daily and weekly SITREP updates, analytics, opinions, and translations of Russia’s experts, like Ruslan Hubiev. and Rostislav Ishchenko. We have posted numerous videos about this war, and statements of President Putin and other officials.

Some other articles concerning the matter

• Russia vs. ECHR: The Rise and Fall of the European Courts
• Kiev Junta’s victims sue Ukraine for hundreds of millions in ECHR
• Behind Ukraine vs. Russia case in the UN International Court icj-cij
• STAND for Ukraine Act H.R. 5094 and its authors
• Breaking news regarding armed conflict in Ukraine In SK press release as following:The SK of Russian Federation initiated criminal cases involving the use of prohibited means and methods of warfare based on previously unknown facts of the Ukrainian military shelling of civilians.“In practice, the armed forces servicemen can easily define what constitutes a “knowingly criminal command,” said the expert of Association of military political scientists, head of the Department of political science and sociology of Plekhanov Russian University of Economics professor Andrey Koshkin: “The criminal command is the use of regular troops against the civilian population. I suspect that this fact lies at the basis of this wording.  It’s a war crime to destroy the civilian population on the orders of the superiors.”

Other criminal cases initiated by the Russia’s Investigative Committee against persons, and official entities in Ukraine committing crimes involving use of prohibited means and methods of warfare.

RT has published a summary of the SK statement and the interviews of the attorneys and legal experts involved in this investigation.

The SK initiated the criminal investigation of the Ukraine armed forces and law enforcement involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation announced that they have initiated a criminal investigation of war crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

When Hybrid Wars go Hot

Article found at https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/01/16/big-guns-better-chow-and-more-us-nato-aggression.html

Published 16 January 2018

Author: Brian Cloughey

Big Guns, Better Chow, and More US-NATO Aggression

A headline in the US military magazine Stars and Stripes last September was eye-catching. It told readers that there were “Big guns, better chow for US soldiers on Russia deterrence mission” in Lithuania. Apparently the guns and chow were provided for the “500 173rd Airborne Brigade soldiers that swooped into the Baltics this month on a mission to deter Russian aggression.”

Then the UK’s Observer newspaper informed us that “US Special Forces have been deployed close to the border with Russia as part of a ‘persistent’ presence of American troops in the Baltics. Dozens of special ops solders are being stationed along Europe’s eastern flank to reassure NATO allies Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The move will also allow the US to monitor Russian manoeuvres amid fears of further destabilisation following its annexation of Crimea in 2014… US special operations forces will complement around 4,000 Nato troops posted to Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in the coming months.”

It was noted by Nick Turse on January 9 that “for the past two years the US has maintained a Special Operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia’s western border. As Special Operations Command chief General Raymond Thomas put it last year, ‘We’ve had persistent presence in every country — every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats.”

What threats? What Russian aggression? What destabilisation? Russia has never threatened any Baltic State and there is not the slightest piece of evidence that Russia wants to invade Lithuania. Their trade balance is that Russia imports total $2.5 billion a year from Lithuania and exports are $3.3 billion and it is in the best interests of both countries to expand this mutually beneficial arrangement, although it seems a trifle strange that although Lithuania’s exports declined by 2.5 per cent in 2016, this was in part “explained by the drop in exports of oil products (due to American competition).”

But all US and most European mainstream media claim that when the majority of the citizens of Crimea voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia, this was somehow evidence of Russian aggression, extending to the Baltic.

As the BBC reported in March 2014, “voters were asked whether they wanted to join Russia, or have greater autonomy within Ukraine” and made their preference clear. In the period between the US-inspired coup in Ukraine and the vote to rejoin Russia there was not a single case of bloodshed in Crimea. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was asked by the government of Crimea to send representatives to monitor the referendum but refused to do so.

There were energetic attempts in the West to paint the post-accession treatment of Ukrainians in Crimea as harsh, but even the ultra-right-wing UK Daily Telegraph reported that “Like many of the Ukrainian servicemen in Crimea, the 600-strong marine battalion in Feodosia has strong local links. Many of the men are either local recruits or have served here so long they have put down roots. Only about 140 of the 600-strong battalion stationed here are expected to return to Ukraine. The remainder, with local family and friends, have opted to remain in Crimea — the land they call home.”

Exactly a year after the referendum Forbes noted that “…the Crimeans are happy right where they are . . . poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tatars — are mostly all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine… Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit.” Not much evidence of Russian aggression there — but a great deal of evidence of Western interference aimed at destabilising the region.

The US-NATO military alliance, the Brussels-Washington nexus mentioned by Forbes, refuses to believe that the citizens of the Peninsula are content or that Russia has no desire to “annex” any territory. As Stars and Stripes informs us, the big guns and better chow for US soldiers sent to Russia’s border are “part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, the United States’ commitment to deter aggression in Europe in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.” The drumbeat of “annexation” is continuous and as with many propaganda campaigns has succeeded because Western media seldom permit publication of even-handed accounts of what actually happened. The Psyops campaign directors are guided by the old saying that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, which is wrongly attributed to Josef Goebbels but spot on for accuracy.

In February 2015 the Washington Times and the UK’s Daily Mail published an objective piece by Steven Hurst of Associated Press in which he stated that “Since the Soviet collapse [the US-NATO military alliance] — as Moscow had feared — has spread eastward, expanding along a line from Estonia in the north to Romania and Bulgaria in the south. The Kremlin claims it had Western assurances that would not happen. Now, Moscow’s only buffers to a complete NATO encirclement on its western border are Finland, Belarus and Ukraine. The Kremlin would not have to be paranoid to look at that map with concern.”

Steven Hurst, it should be noted, is an “AP international political writer [who] reported from Moscow for 12 years and has covered international relations for 33 years.” No Western mainstream media published his piece of balanced analysis. Well, they wouldn’t would they? — it didn’t fit with the propaganda line.

After the Warsaw Pact disbanded in March 1991 the US-NATO military alliance, although deprived of any reason to continue in existence not only kept going but in 1999 added Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to its then 16 members. As the BBC noted, these countries became “the first former Soviet bloc states to join NATO, taking the alliance’s borders some 400 miles towards Russia.”

NATO continued to expand around Russia’s borders, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joining in 2004. As President Putin observed in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera in 2015, “we are not expanding anywhere; it is NATO infrastructure, including military infrastructure, that is moving towards our borders. Is this a manifestation of our aggression?”

But US Big Guns and Better Chow will continue to surge against Russia’s borders, as the US-NATO alliance continues its confrontation. Russia will have to remain militarily alert for the foreseeable future, until saner councils prevail in the West’s military-industrial complex