Many of Those Condemned in the Trials of the 1930s WERE Guilty

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Some of the “best people”, that is, our intelligentsia, turned on the FSB’s director because he pointed up that some of the people convicted in the trials of the 1930s were actually guilty, as they wish to do nothing more than condemn what they call the “crimes” of the Bolshevik authorities. What he said was:

Although many say that this period saw a massive fabrication of charges, the archival material shows objective evidence in a large proportion of criminal cases, including famous “show” trials. That the group around Trotsky wanted to overthrow or even eliminate I V Stalin and his colleagues in the VKP (b) leadership wasn’t fiction, as were the ties of these conspirators with foreign intelligence services. In addition, many of the defendants in those trials were members of the nomenklatura and officers of the security organs long involved in corruption, arbitrariness, and official injustice.

https://www.rg.ru/2017/12/19/aleksandr-bortnikov-fsb-rossii-svobodna-ot-politicheskogo-vliianiia.html

Are you telling me that all the repressed Old Bolsheviks were innocent? On the other hand, is it just because a part of the intelligentsia sees these people as their historical predecessors, and is afraid of a similar verdict by the court of history and in the verdict of the people? In fact, the only true innocents were those few people who didn’t betray the tsar and their faith, who suffered for their allegiance to them. Many of the New Martyrs were amongst them. However, the collective sins of many Russian classes are obvious to me… as is the justice of the punishment that struck them. By the way, only Protestant rationalists, contrary to Scripture and Tradition, believe that sins can only be personal.

Was the peasantry, who seized land from the manors, perfectly innocent? Who was innocent amongst the clergy, who only protested when it affected their corporate interests… or, the aristocracy, many of whom donned red cockades… or, the Duma Deputies, industrialists, and party leaders who plotted against the tsar in wartime… or, the Red commanders who shot down their own people? The Lord God isn’t mocked. True is His justice. He metes out according to our just desserts. This isn’t just about the past.

24 December 2017

Vsevolod Chaplin

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FBI and FSB May Be Chasing Same Gang of Cyber-Crooks

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Editor:

Some made much of “Russians hacking Yahoo”. Now, you don’t hear as much about it. I’d say it’s because the Russian hackers ran a “roll-your-own” criminal enterprise… it wasn’t an official act by the FSB, after all. It just goes to show you that peevishly cutting contacts with someone for no good reason always ends badly. Both the USA and Russia have a common interest in catching cyber-crooks. Perhaps, we can return to sanity, God willing…

BMD

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The naming of Dmitri Dokuchaev in both the Moscow cyber-arrests and the Yahoo suggests the USA and Russia may unwittingly be on the track of the same criminal gang. Earlier this year, reports appeared in the Russian media of a series of arrests of FSB officers and cyber-specialists, including Ruslan Stoyanov, an employee of Russia’s top cybersecurity company, Kaspersky Lab. Subsequently, it came out that some of them (at least) faced treason charges, for the case supposedly involved the USA, with Stoyanov supposedly charged with passing on Russian state secrets to Verigin, a US company. Following the arrests, numerous reports circulated speculating that these arrests were somehow connected to the hacking of John Podesta’s and the DNC’s computers. Some sections of the Western media made claims… strongly denied the Russia… that the individuals arrested were the ones who had carried out the hacking of John Podesta’s and the DNC’s computers. Others, rather more plausibly, speculated that those arrested were some of the informers who provided information to the USA that the US intelligence community used to support its claims of Russian responsibility for the Podesta and DNC hacks.

The case of the arrested FSB officers in Moscow has taken an extraordinary new twist with the US Department of Justice bringing charges against a group of four Russian cyber-criminals, who according to the US Department of Justice’s report, are being charged with:

the 2014 hack into the network of email provider Yahoo, the theft of information about at least 500 million Yahoo accounts and the use of that information to get the contents of accounts at Yahoo and other email providers.

What makes the Yahoo case interesting is that the Department of Justice is saying that two of the individuals charged are FSB officers. The Department of Justice identifies them as follows:

The defendants include two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), an intelligence and law enforcement agency of the Russian Federation and two criminal hackers with whom they conspired to accomplish these intrusions. Dmitri Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, both FSB officers, protected, directed, facilitated, and paid criminal hackers to collect information through computer intrusions in the USA and elsewhere. They worked with co-conspirators Aleksei Belan and Karim Baratov to hack into computers of American companies providing email and internet-related services, to maintain unauthorised access to those computers, and to steal information, including information about users and the private contents of their accounts. The defendants targeted Yahoo accounts of Russian and US government officials, including cybersecurity, diplomatic, and military personnel. They also targeted Russian journalists; numerous employees of other providers whose networks the conspirators sought to exploit; and employees of financial services and other commercial entities.

Dmitri Dokuchaev, one of the FSB officers charged by the US Justice Department in the Yahoo hack, appears to be the same Dmitri Dokuchaev arrested in Moscow in the treason case, and whom the London Times described… obviously based on information obtained from British intelligence sources… as “a cyber-spy and former hacker”. The fact that the same man… Dmitri Dokuchaev… faces charges simultaneously in both cases, the one in Washington and the one in Moscow makes it at least possible that the two cases… the Yahoo case in Washington and the treason case in Moscow… are in some way connected, and may involve the same group of cyber-criminals. Importantly, the Department of Justice’s and the FBI’s claims about Dokuchaev and Sushchin, the two FSB officers charged in the Yahoo case, don’t necessarily point to them undertaking an intelligence operation on behalf of the Russian government. Though the wording isn’t completely clear, it isn’t inconsistent with Dokuchaev and Sushchin running a rogue operation for the purpose of self-enrichment. Here is what the Department of Justice report has to say about them:

Belan’s notorious criminal conduct and a pending Interpol Red Notice didn’t stop the FSB officers who, instead of detaining him, used him to break into Yahoo’s networks. Meanwhile, Belan used his relationship with the two FSB officers and his access to Yahoo to commit additional crimes to line his own pockets with money. For those not familiar with the FSB, it’s an intelligence and law enforcement agency and a successor to the USSR’s KGB. The FSB unit that the defendants worked for, the Centre for Information Security, AKA Center 18, is also the FBI’s point of contact in Moscow for cybercrime matters. The involvement and direction of FSB officers with law enforcement responsibilities makes this conduct that much more egregious. There are no free passes for foreign state-sponsored criminal behaviour.

This appears to suggest that the Department of Justice believes that Dokuchaev and Sushchin recruited Belan to carry out illegal hacks of US companies on behalf of the FSB and that Belan used the protection this gave him to carry out more illegal hacks to enrich himself and them. However, it’s equally or perhaps more likely that Dokuchaev and Sushchin were Belan’s accomplices in a series of crimes carried out on their own initiative. After all, it’s hardly unusual for criminals to enlist the services of corrupt law enforcement officers to help them carry out their crimes. Such a thing undoubtedly happens in Russia, just as it happens in most other places. What the FBI itself says about him strongly suggests that Dokuchaev (at least) was a corrupt FSB officer involved in a rogue operation. Here’s the information the FBI provided about his activities, which appeared in the Most Wanted Notice the FBI issued about him:

• Conspiring to Commit Computer Fraud and Abuse
• Accessing a Computer Without Authorisation for the Purpose of Commercial Advantage and Private Financial Gain
• Damaging a Computer Through the Transmission of Code and Commands
• Economic Espionage
• Theft of Trade Secrets
• Access Device Fraud
• Aggravated Identity Theft
• Wire Fraud

The words “purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain” point clearly to a rogue criminal operation and not an official state-sponsored one. What the FBI has to say about Dokuchaev’s alleged accomplice Igor Sushchin in its Most Wanted Notice about him strongly suggests that the FBI’s knowledge of the case still has gaps:

Sushchin has Russian citizenship and is known to hold a Russian passport. Sushchin is alleged to be a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Officer of unknown rank. In addition to working for the FSB, he is alleged to have served as Head of Information Security for a Russian company, providing information about employees of that company to the FSB. He was last known to be in Moscow, Russia.

These comments about Sushchin cast doubt on whether Sushchin really is an FSB officer. The FBI says that Sushchin is simultaneously an officer of the FSB and the head of information security at a Russian company. Moonlighting in the private sector was a common practice for FSB officers in the chaotic 1990s. It’s hardly conceivable today. It seems more likely that Sushchin is head of information security for a Russian company, but that because of his relationship with Dokuchaev, the FBI supposes him to be an FSB officer. Its Most Wanted Notice about Sushchin shows that the FBI doesn’t know that Sushchin actually is an FSB officer. It merely guesses he is, and on the facts that the FBI itself provides, it’s probably wrong. To add to the uncertainty there is a question mark about Dokuchaev’s own role within the FSB. According to reports in Russia, Dokuchaev isn’t a conventional FSB officer at all, but he’s rather a notorious former hacker and cyber-criminal blackmailed by the FSB into working for them. Here is what the Moscow-based Moscow Times has to say about him:

Major Dmitri Dokuchaev, one of four cyber-security experts arrested by the Kremlin on charges of treason, has allegedly been revealed as an infamous Russian hacker. Dokuchaev worked as a hacker under the alias “Forb” until Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) threatened to jail him, an unverified source told the RBC newspaper. “Forb” gave an interview to the Russian newspaper Vedomosti in 2004, revealing that he specialised in “hacking on request” and stealing money from bank cards… an occupation which he said could earn him anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000 USD (286,100 to 1.717 million Roubles. 34,540 to 207,250 Renminbi. 327,390 to 1.965 million INR. 6,669 to 40,010 CAD. 6,502 to 39,010 AUD. 4,650 to 27,900 Euros. 4,033 to 24,200 UK Pounds) a month. He also claimed that he had carried out a successful attack on US government infrastructure. The FSB ultimately traced Dokuchaev to the card thefts, and threatened to prosecute the hacker unless he agreed to work for the agency, the source alleged.

If what the Moscow Times article says is true (and the story looks well-sourced) then Dokuchaev’s criminal past makes it even more plausible that what he engaged in was a rogue criminal operation not officially sanctioned by the FSB. Recruiting a notorious cyber-criminal to track down other cyber-criminals is a strange idea, but hardly unique in the world of law-enforcement. Possibly the FSB, lacking its own trained cyber-specialists as a result of the crisis of the 1990s, looked to people like Dokuchaev to fill its ranks quickly. If so, then, this has now come back to bite it, with another FSB officer… Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy head of the FSB’s security information centre (the FSB department for which the US Justice Department says Dokuchaev worked), who may have been Dokuchaev’s superior and line manager… seemingly also implicated in Dokuchaev’s activities.

This is a tangled web. However, if we put together what is known about the case in Moscow with what is now known about the case in Washington, then, it’s at least possible that this is a case of two parallel investigations into the activities of the same gang.  Belan and Dokuchaev would presumably be the ringleaders, but it seems that Dokuchaev succeeded in involving at least one other person (Mikhailov) within the FSB as well. Supporting the theory that the treason case in Moscow and the Yahoo case in Washington are the products of two parallel investigations into the activities of the same gang, is a report carried by TASS of the comments of a lawyer familiar with the Moscow case.  The lawyer reportedly said the following:

The CIA isn’t mentioned in the case. Only the country is mentioned. Yes, the talk is about America, not about the CIA.

When I previously discussed this comment in an article written on 2 February 2017, I assumed it referred to the passing of classified information to the US intelligence community, if not to the CIA itself. I overlooked the fact that the lawyer’s comment has no hint of this. Instead, the lawyer merely said, “the talk is about America”. His words are equally consistent with data theft from the USA as with information transfer to the USA. It’s likely that both took place. If the cases in Moscow and Washington involve the activities of the same gang of cyber-criminals, then, it seems that they were equally happy to steal information from the USA and to steal information from Russia and sell it to the USA. That would explain the claim about the passing of classified information to Verigin, with which Stoyanov is charged, which is presumably what lies behind the treason charges. However, in any case, the motive for the gang’s activities would have been the same… the classic criminal one… to make money. As it happens, the US Justice Department confirmed in its report the fact that the gang was targeting Russians as well as Americans:

The defendants targeted Yahoo accounts of Russian and US government officials, including cybersecurity, diplomatic, and military personnel. They also targeted Russian journalists; numerous employees of other providers whose networks the conspirators sought to exploit; and employees of financial services and other commercial entities.

Much is murky about this affair. Although the known facts do suggest that the arrests in Moscow and the charges in Washington concern the same gang or at least the same people, that isn’t yet absolutely certain, and it could be that Dokuchaev, who figures so prominently in both cases, spread his net wide and involved more than one gang in his activities. However, if the two cases do involve the same gang, then, unfortunately, it’s all too clear from the information trickling out of both Washington and Moscow that the relevant law enforcement agencies of the USA and Russia aren’t cooperating with each other and are completely uninformed and possibly even unaware of each other’s investigations. If so, then, that’s regrettable, since it can only increase the chance that the two investigations would work against each other and at cross-purposes, as in fact actually seems to be the case.

At this point, however, one can make a few points with confidence. Firstly, it’s clear that the Moscow arrests have absolutely nothing to do with the hacking of the computers of John Podesta and the DNC. The case in Moscow is a criminal investigation into the activities of a gang of cyber-criminals, who practised criminal activity for financial gain. They may be and probably are the same gang the US Justice Department and the FBI say is behind the Yahoo hack. Regardless, all the stories claiming that the Moscow case somehow has connections to the DNC and Podesta leaks are wrong. Secondly, the claims in the Russian media that the arrests in Moscow had something to do with the Shaltay Boltai hacking group are also clearly wrong. In that case, the confusion is understandable. It seems there’s a wholly separate investigation into the Shaltay Boltai group going on as well. Unsurprisingly, some journalists in Moscow have confused the two, failing to realise that they are two wholly distinct investigations into two different groups of people. Thirdly, if the investigations in Washington and Moscow are, indeed, parallel investigations into the activities of the same gang, then, this shows the huge damage done by the severing of contacts between the US and Russian law enforcement agencies carried out by the Obama administration.

Instead of pooling information to track down and prosecute the same gang of cyber-criminals, they’re conducting two wholly separate and rival investigations in two different countries, which quite possibly involve the same gang. The result is that neither investigation is getting all the facts. Worse, the potential for conflict and misunderstanding between Washington and Moscow increased. Both Washington and Moscow seem to be convinced that what looks to be the same gang was working for the intelligence agencies of the other side. The result is that the USA and Russia are blaming each other for the gang’s activities whilst protesting… correctly… their own innocence.

Perhaps, one day, if Trump finally comes through with his proposed détente with Russia, we’d avoid this sort of muddle and recrimination. If so, then, coöperation between the law enforcement agencies of the two countries would be a further important step in reducing misunderstandings and improving relations. However, until that happens, the sort of confusion, misunderstanding, and exchange of blame and recriminations we’re now seeing will continue unabated.

17 March 2017

Alexander Mercouris

The Duran

http://theduran.com/moscow-cyber-arrests-yahoo-hack/

Putin Makes an Offer to Donald Trump

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In a meeting with the senior staff of the FSB, President V V Putin outlined the threats facing Russia and the contours of a deal that he might do with US President Donald Trump. Whilst Trump battles the US intelligence community and the US élite, the foreign leader he most wants to deal with… Putin… addressed the senior staff of the FSB, Russia’s counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence agency, an organisation he once headed.

Whilst it’s all too tempting to contrast President Putin’s complete control of his government and intelligence services with President Trump’s struggle to achieve mastery over his own, one should resist that temptation. President Putin didn’t always have the undisputed mastery of his government and intelligence services that he has now. Only in 2003, following the arrest of the once all-powerful oligarch M B Khodorkovsky, and the subsequent expulsion from the government of individuals like former Chairman of the Government M M Kasyanov and former Minister of Foreign Affairs I S Ivanov (men beholden to Khodorkovsky and other oligarchs), did President Putin achieve the undisputed control of the Russian government and intelligence services that he has now.

The US and Russian political systems differ profoundly from each other, and one shouldn’t press the parallel between President Putin’s struggle with the oligarchs and President Trump’s current struggle with the US élite too far. Nonetheless, it does show one important fact that those frustrated by some of President Trump’s recent actions need to bear in mind… mere possession of the office of President in any political system doesn’t automatically translate into control of the government. A President who really wants to become the master of his government… as opposed to being a mere cypher for his bureaucracy… has to fight to achieve it. However, if President Putin didn’t always have the undisputed control of his government and intelligence services, he certainly has it now, and his meeting with the senior staff of the FSB serves to illustrate the fact. The meeting however also illustrates two other things:

• the pressure Russia has been under
• what President Putin and Russia actually want from US President Trump and the deal they want to make with him

On the question of the pressure Russia has been under, during his meeting with the FSB President Putin made this quite extraordinary comment:

Counterintelligence services also face greater demands today. Operational data show that foreign intelligence services’ activity in Russia hasn’t decreased. Last year, our counterintelligence services put a stop to the work of 53 foreign intelligence officers and 386 agents.

It bears saying that over the course of the hysterical scandal in the USA about the DNC and Podesta leaks, the fake “Trump Dossier”, and the telephone conversation between the Russian ambassador and General Flynn, so far, they’ve arrested not a single person or charged anyone with anything. Yet, here we have President Putin blandly saying that over the same period that this wave of hysteria and scandal has been underway in the USA, the FSB in Russia “stopped the work of 53 foreign intelligence officers and 386 agents”. This astonishing claim (imagine the FBI announcing it had uncovered 386 foreign agents working in the USA in the space of a single year) isn’t merely made calmly and almost in passing, with no special emphasis given to it, but it attracted almost no publicity, either from the Russian media or internationally.

President Putin’s comments on the pressure Russia has been under also highlight a further point… unlike the USA and the EU, Russia… with no assistance from the West… fought a home-grown Jihadist insurgency on its own soil. It proved remarkably successful in doing so, so that whereas when Putin became President Jihadists physically controlled large areas of Russian territory, today, they barely control any, reduced to a sporadically functioning (but still dangerous) terrorist movement. Nonetheless, as President Putin said, there’s no room for complacency or relaxation in the struggle against them:

The events and circumstances I mentioned require our security and intelligence services, especially the FSB, to concentrate their utmost attention and effort on the paramount task of fighting terrorism. We’ve already seen that our intelligence services dealt some serious blows to terrorists and their accomplices. Last year’s results confirm this… the number of terrorism-related crimes decreased. Preventive work has brought results. The FSB and other security agencies, with the National Antiterrorist Committee as coordinator, prevented 45 terrorism-related crimes, including 16 planned terrorist attacks. You deserve special gratitude for this. You need to continue your active efforts to identify and block terrorist groups’ activity, eliminate their financial base, prevent the activities of their emissaries from abroad and their dangerous activity on the internet, and take into account in this work Russian and international experience in this area. The murder of our ambassador to Turkey was a terrible crime that particularly highlighted the need to protect our citizens and missions abroad. I ask you to work together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SVR to take additional measures to ensure their safety. Our priorities include firmly suppressing extremism. Security methods must go hand-in-hand with constant preventive work. It’s essential to prevent extremism from drawing young people into its criminal networks and to form an overall firm rejection of nationalism, xenophobia, and aggressive radicalism. In this context, of great importance is an open dialogue with civil society institutions and figures from Russia’s traditional religions.

Again, one is astonished to hear President Putin calmly say that his anti-terrorist agencies prevented 16 planned terrorist attacks on Russian territory in one year, as this was something everyday and normal. One has to ask what Western country has to face a terrorist assault on this scale. Over and above these “traditional” threats to Russia, Russia must also face the threat of cyberattacks, something openly talked about by former US President Obama and former US Vice-President Biden. Putin’s comments about this to the FSB are especially interesting in that they effectively confirm… although they don’t quite say… that although individual Russian agencies are responsible for ensuring their own cybersecurity, the FSB has overall responsibility for protecting Russia’s cybersecurity as a whole:

I’d like to note that the number of cyberattacks on official information resources tripled in 2016 compared to 2015. In this context, each agency must develop its segment of the state system for detecting and preventing cyberattacks on information resources and eliminating their consequences.

Whilst these comments give a clear idea of the range of the FSB’s work… showing once again that it’s an internal security agency and not an agency tasked with collecting foreign intelligence… President Putin took the opportunity of his meeting with the senior staff of the FSB to touch on foreign policy questions:

The global situation hasn’t become any more stable or better over the past year. On the contrary, many existing threats and challenges only became acuter. The military-political and economic rivalry between global and regional policy makers and between individual countries increased. We see bloody conflicts continue in a number of countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. International terrorist groups, essentially terrorist armies, receiving tacit and sometimes even open support from some countries, take an active part in these conflicts. The NATO summit last July in Warsaw declared Russia the main threat to the alliance for the first time since 1989, and NATO officially proclaimed containing Russia its new mission. With this aim, NATO continues its expansion. This expansion was already underway earlier, but now they believe they have even-more-serious reasons for doing so. They stepped up the deployment of strategic and conventional arms beyond the national borders of the principal NATO member states. They provoke us constantly and try to draw us into a confrontation. We see continued attempts to interfere in our internal affairs in a bid to destabilise the social and political situation in Russia itself. We also saw the recent serious flare-up in the southeast Ukraine (sic). This escalation pursues the clear aim of preventing the Minsk Agreements from going ahead. The current Ukrainian authorities are obviously not seeking a peaceful solution to this very complex problem; they decided to opt for the use of force instead. What’s more, they speak openly about organising sabotage and terrorism, particularly in Russia. Obviously, this is a matter of great concern.

These comments highlight Russia’s key areas of priority and it’s striking how far they differ from those Western commentators continuously attribute to them. There isn’t a word here about lifting sanctions, dissolving NATO or the EU, “treating Russia as an equal to the USA” on the global stage, recognising a Russian sphere of interest in Eastern Europe, “restoring the USSR”, conquering the Baltic States, or even arms control. Instead, Russia’s stated priorities are those I identified in my article of 19 January 2017:

• ending NATO expansion especially into the territories of the former USSR
• ending the West’s deployment of anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe (“the deployment of strategic and conventional arms beyond the national borders of the principal NATO member states”)
• ending the West’s régime-change policy, first and foremost as it pertains to Russia (“we see continued attempts to interfere in our internal affairs in a bid to destabilise the social and political situation in Russia itself”)

As I discussed in my 19 January article, in theory, it shouldn’t be difficult for President Trump to agree to all these things if he wants to do a deal with Russia because none of them affects the USA’s essential interests. Setting out these central Russian concerns shows how a deal between Russia and a Donald Trump administration might be possible. None of Russia’s concerns on any one of these issues affects Western security or impinges on the USA’s national interests. Trump called NATO “obsolete” and expressed indifference about the EU’s future. He’s clearly uninterested in expanding either into the territory of the former USSR, so he has no reason to feel that he’s making any serious concession by agreeing not to do so. Similarly, Trump has already forsworn the whole policy of régime-change. If so, then, he already agrees with Russia on this issue too.

The major sticking point will be arms control, with trust badly damaged because of Obama’s actions, with Russia almost certainly insisting on the dismantling of the anti-ballistic missile systems in Eastern Europe in return for nuclear weapons cuts. Indeed, Trump homed in on the issue of arms control in his interview with The London Times and Bild-Zeitung. However, securing an agreement to dismantle anti-ballistic missile systems in the teeth of what is likely to be furious opposition from US Congressional leadership, much of the Republican Party, and the powerful US armaments lobby, will be a titanic challenge. A complex and difficult negotiation lies ahead. Even the assumption Trump will succeed in consolidating his control of the US government is open to question, it’s far from clear he’d succeed. However, there’s one overwhelming point that argues in its favour… any objective assessment sees that what Russia wants from Trump is in the USA’s interest for him to give.

The USA loses nothing by agreeing to the things Russia wants because they in no way threaten the USA’s security or that of its allies. On the contrary, the pursuit of the grand geopolitical strategies of the neocons, with the policies of NATO expansion, anti-ballistic missile deployment, and regime-change that go with them, have brought the USA to an impasse. It is in the USA’s interest and in the interests of the USA’s allies to yield on them. Trump’s comments show that he has at least some understanding of this fact. We’ll have to wait and see how great that understanding is and whether he’d be able to put it into practise.

If he can do a deal on these fundamental issues, it isn’t difficult to see how he could also do a deal on the Ukraine, the issue that many people (wrongly, in my opinion) treat as a sticking point. As it happens, it isn’t at all difficult to see how one could do a deal on the Ukraine. In his comments to the senior staff of the FSB Putin made it clear that Russia wants the complete implementation of the Minsk Accords. Of course, that’s precisely what various officials of the Trump administration… Pence, Mattis, Tillerson, Haley, and of course Trump himself… also say. Given that this is so, provided the good will was there, it shouldn’t be difficult to agree on a deal on the Ukraine involving the complete implementation of the Minsk Accords. Everyone knows that the true reason that such a deal hasn’t happened up to now isn’t that Russia doesn’t want it. Instead, there’s no good will on the part of the Western powers, who’ve colluded with the Ukraine’s noncompliance with the Minsk Accords. Were this to change… it’d be something that’d be easy to do since everyone says that they want to see the Minsk Accords implemented… a breakthrough could quickly happen. Of course, it’s true that the Ukraine, at least in its present form, would be unlikely to survive the full implementation of the Minsk Accords. That’s why the Ukraine refuses to implement them. However, that isn’t something that… based on his own words… ought to concern President Trump. The key point is that if President Trump genuinely wants a deal on the Ukraine, the elements for it are all already there.

If Russia… as Putin’s comments to the senior staff of the FSB show… isn’t actually asking for very much (and nothing that President Trump should, in theory, find it impossible to concede)… it’s offering (as Putin’s comments to the FSB also show) what’s been on the table for a long time… coöperation in the fight against Jihadist terrorism, an issue that President Trump says is his foreign policy priority:

You must also work to take our counterterrorism coöperation with partners abroad to a new level, despite the difficulties that we see in various areas of international life. Of course, it’s a priority to intensify work with our partners in organisations such as the UN, the CSTO, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. It’s in our common interests to restore dialogue with the US intelligence services and with other NATO member countries. It wasn’t our fault that these ties ended. It wasn’t our fault that they didn’t develop. It’s very clear that all responsible countries and international groups should work together on counterterrorism because even simply exchanging information on terrorists’ financing channels and sources and on people involved in or suspected of links with terrorism can substantially improve the results of our common efforts.

Rarely in the history of international relations have the contours of a deal been easier to see… Russia is asking Trump for what he should have no trouble giving, and in return, they actually want to give him exactly the thing he says he wants. The biggest sticking point isn’t the Ukraine but anti-ballistic defence, although even on this issue, with the necessary goodwill, it should be possible to finesse some sort of agreement, probably based on the old 1970s concept of arms limitation and not the contemporary one of arms reduction. Whether we’d do the deal is another matter. Not only is it unclear whether Trump realises how easy the deal he wants with the Russians is, but he has to face down his many critics who don’t want a deal at all. However, the outlines of a deal, if he wants one, are there.

21 February 2017

Alexander Mercouris

The Duran

http://theduran.com/vladimir-putin-fsb-make-offer-to-donald-trump/

Poroshenko Alleged that 80 Percent of SBU Personnel were FSB Agents in Disguise

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At Karazin Kharkov National University, junta strongman P A Poroshenko alleged that In 2012, some 80 percent of SBU entrants were actually agents of the FSB. Poroshenko didn’t say anything about the current situation. Experts believe that such statements suggest that Poroshenko and SBU Director V A Nalivaichenko intend to continue to purge the SBU and other agencies, replacing competent professionals with hacks willing to collaborate with American and NATO intelligence agencies.

27 March 2015

Russkaya Vesna

http://infopolk.ru/1/V/news/1427435489#21a416da-878e-49ac-1c45-047028f1fb7f

Editor:

One of the reasons that the junta has piss-poor intel is that the junta’s replacing professional agents with incompetent Galician Uniate poseurs… what the hey, they DO know how to strum banduras! It’s a Kholkhol paradise! Remember, NOTHING is ever a Galician’s fault… it all those nasty old Moskals! Haven’t you heard that one once too often? Well, he ain’t called Choco Loco for nothin’, kids…

BMD