Russia's January 6

When Wagner Group militia leader Yevgeny Prigozhin (below) became annoyed when his benefactor, Russian President Vladimir Putin, kept shortchanging and ignoring his requests for more materiel to fight the war in Ukraine,  he'd clearly had enough.  He led his mercenaries toward Moscow and exposed Putin's weakness as a leader  But Putin still had an ace card to play - the Russian air force - and their counterattack on the Wagner forces on their way to deposing Putin convinced Prigozhin, a one-time oligarch and restaurateur, to cut his losses.  He presumably made his way to Belarus, whose president, Alexander Lukashenko, granted him asylum in exchange for Putin to promise not to haul Prigozhin's butt before  Russian tribunal and tried for insurrection.

Putin got himself a reprieve, as Prigozhin's plan to storm the Kremlin never got that far, but Prigozhin has made it clear that Bad Vlad's days are numbered.  The war in Ukraine is going so badly for him that even Russian soldiers are turning against him.  Wagner mercenaries had been on his side, because that's their job, but that is clearly no longer true.  An inside coup perpetrated from a top Kremlin official is the likeliest outcome for Putin, and it could happen much sooner than any of us dare think.  Three things are for certain.  The first is that Putin will be gone soon, and the second is that Russia is going to be in even greater turmoil as the country figures out who's in charge.

And the third thing is that Donald Trump will have to find another sympathetic world leader to interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. 

Exchange Politics

You would expect folks to be happy that basketball star Brittney Griner is home after being in a Russian penal colony for ten months, after she was exchanged in  prisoner swap with a Russian arms merchant held in the States.  You'd think Republicans would be happy, even.  Uh, no, they're not.

President Biden had hoped to get Griner (above) and ex-Marine Paul Whelan out, but the Russians made it clear that only Griner, who was arrested while playing professional basketball in Russia for carrying a bottle of cannabis oil back in February 2022, could be part of a trade.  Biden made what he knew was a difficult decision and agreed to the trade.  Republicans are bashing the President for trading an arms merchant who has caused the deaths of many people for an athlete in jail for a misdemeanor.  Now why do they have a problem with that - especially when they had no problem with Trump not doing anything to help Whelan, in Russian custody since 2018, get out earlier?

Donald Trump, Jr. let the cat out of the bag.  He accused the Biden administration of letting Griner, a black lesbian, come home over the white guy because they wanted to score "DEI" (diversity, equity, and inclusiveness) points with the Democratic base .

Republicans are quite happy to let an arms merchant or a terrorist free in exchange for an American, so long as that American is more likely to be a fan of Travis Tritt than a fan of Travis Scott. I'm sure GOP pols like Kevin McCarthy - who also hated the prisoner-trade deal and is probably going to have the Republican House investigate that if he becomes House Speaker - hated the mere optics of a black lesbian in cornrows come home while her wife - also black, also with cornrowed hair - was gushing with joy in the White House with President Biden and Vice President Harris.  David Whelan, who is Paul Whelan's brother and also a white guy, must similarly be pissed at Biden!

No, he isn't.  He's cool with the prisoner swap and has confidence that Biden will get Paul out of Russia, or at least he'll continue to try getting home out for as long as he's President. Which, David Whelan noted, was something Donald Trump, Sr. never bothered with.

Boomerang!  

Elders and Zion

The Islamic gerontocracy that still rules Iran after 43 years (and may continue to do so for another 43 years, despite the latest wave of protests) are selling Russia sophisticated suicide drones that are full of explosives and attack predetermined targets kamikaze-style.

Not only are Russians using Iranian drones to attack Ukraine, the Iranians are on the ground giving assistance to Russian troops that are using them.

Now why would the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, help the Russians fight a country Iran has no quarrel with?  Foreign-affairs experts believe that Iran, a junior partner in the post-Cold War, post-Soviet Russian bloc, wants to increase its profile on the world stage and be taken seriously by the Russians as an equal partner.

I think there's a second reason, and I'll come out and say it: Iran wants to help Russia fight Ukraine because Ukraine has a Jewish president. 

The mullahs in Iran hate all non-Muslims, but in the case of Jews that goes double.

The Iranians deny helping the Russians, of course.  They would.

Putin Expands NATO?

Finland has always had an uneasy relationship with Russia.  It was part of the old Czarist Russian empire until Russia's capitulation in World War I gave the Finns the opportunity to gain its independence, but when the Soviet Union sought to reclaim land from the old empire's western frontier and fortify it against a possible German invasion at the start of World War II, Joseph Stalin made demands of the Finns, who refused to accept them.  The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, and the Finns held out throughout the winter of 1939-40 in the so-called Winter War before bowing to the Red Army's superiority.  (Finns foolishly cast their lot with the Nazis when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, only to be on the losing side again.)  Finland had to promise to remain a neutral nation after World War II to maintain its independence, which meant not joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Now, however, the people who invented the Molotov cocktail in the Winter War are on the verge of joining NATO thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the the locals are mixing Molotov cocktails up in every kitchen sink they can find.  Finland is afraid of Putin possibly threatening its 800-mile border with Russia, and the Finns have begun a process to enter NATO membership.  Sweden - always hostile to Russian expansion and being the only country on Europe's far northern land mass that doesn't border Russia (yes, Norway borders Russia, check the map) - is even looking into the idea.

If Vladimir Putin thought he could intimidate NATO, he really screwed up big time.

But it's not all bad news for Putin.  French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has proposed that NATO enter an alliance with Russia once the war in Ukraine - a war President Biden is helping Ukraine fight by giving it $800 million in additional military aid - is over.

Le Pen wants France and Britain to enter into an alliance with Russia?  What is this, 1914?

For more about Russo-Finnish relations, watch this video.

A Nuclear Error

It's become obvious that Vladimir Putin will stop at nothing to make Ukraine submit to his will, even if it means making the entire country glow in the dark.

This is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the largest one in the country and the largest such plant in all of Europe (and that's counting the one in Armenia, assuming you think of Armenia as a European rather than an Asian country).  The plan generates 20 percent of all the electricity generated in Ukraine and half of Ukraine's nuclear power.  Built in 1980 when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, the plant came under fire the other day from Russian forces and radiation allegedly leaked out.  We were spared another Chernobyl - that's also in Ukraine - when radiation levels proved to be normal, but it seems that Putin was ready to blow up the plant if he had to deny Ukrainians vital power.  Now the Zaporizhzhia plant is being operated by Ukrainian plant managers with Russian guns pointed at their heads.

And who know what Putin will do next with it.  He's certainly not going to let it keep operating unless he can personally benefit from it.

Quit holding out and draw another breath . . .. 😱

Russian Roulette

It looked like we were finally getting out of the COVID crisis thanks to vaccinations.  Now it looks one leader could ruin everything.  And it's not the governor of Texas.  It's the president of Russia.

Vladimir Putin's latest slight-of-hand is to get Russian bots to place misinformation on social media about the vaccines the United States has approved up to now and how ineffective they are.  They trick is obvious - get fewer Americans to get vaccinated and make it more difficult for the United States to get more herd immunity. And if the Russians can use their bots to cause enough doubts in vaccines developed in the West - in other countries as well as the U.S. - they can create a bigger market for the Sputnik virus.  No prizes for guessing who developed that.  

The good news is that we have a President and a Secretary of State who will tell Putin to cut it out. The bad news is that enough gullible, unsuspecting stupid Americans who believe the misinformation that's already gotten out.

HACK!

I don't know what to say about the hacking of the multiple U.S. Government agencies - including the Energy and Commerce Departments and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which takes care of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile - that have been taking place for the past nine months.

Except for this: This is just one more example of why you don't elect a real-estate developer with a TV reality show pretending to be a documentary as the leader of your country.

Russia is probably behind this hacking, though the Russians deny it.  The attack wasn't detected not by the government's own security system but by a private firm.  Someone in the White House must-have changed all of the login passwords to 12345 - as we all know, that's the sort of lock combination some idiot would put on his luggage!

Good thing Trump will be gone in a month.

And he's likely all packed and ready to go, despite his protests of election fraud.

By the way, to get into his suitcases to make sure he isn't taking anything from the White House that doesn't belong to him, I would advise the Secret Service to open his suitcases with the combination 12345. 😜  

Tangled Web

Hillary Clinton celebrated her seventieth birthday last week and got a present from Senate Republicans - an investigation.  She learned, as did the rest of us, that the Senate was planning to investigate her for approving a sale of a uranium mine to a Russian company while Secretary of State and receiving a donation for the Clinton Foundation from the company that sold the mine to the Russians . . . and for colluding with the Democratic National Committee into paying for the compilation of a dossier of records showing a relationship between Donald Trump and Russia that was assembled and written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, between June and December of 2016.  This was more of a gift for Trump than for Hillary; he pounced on both reports hoping that they would be bigger news than the indictment coming from Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump, which everyone knew would be against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.  So who cares about Paul Manafort, who left the Trump campaign early?  Especially with Hillary conspiring with Russia! 

As expected, it was Manafort who, along with a guy named Rick Gates, got indicted for, of all things, money laundering.  But also caught with his pants down was ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, who was found to have been in contact with foreign nationals tied to the Russians offering dirt on Hillary and seeking a connection with the Trump campaign.  Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying about it in early October 2017.

The Papadopoulos case is more serious for the Trump White House.  Manafort's charges pre-date his association with Trump.  But Papadopoulos's role in the campaign may reveal something about the Russia connections Trump has that he doesn't want anyone to know about.

Oh, and about the charges against Hillary . . . Uranium One, the Canadian company that sold the mine to a Russian company - the uranium for which must be used for energy purposes and can't be exported out of the United States - was approved by a board independent of the State Department, and that dossier had been started for one of Trump's Republican presidential primary opponents.

Trump should just admit that he's trying to deflect attention from charges against his cronies.  But investigations against Hillary are likely going to proceed anyway.  I don't know why.  She's irrelevant.  The way Trump and the GOP are still going after her, you'd think the entire Democratic Party didn't matter!

Ha ha, perish the thought!

A tangled web indeed . . .

From Russia With Love

Okay, all of those Hillary fans blaming Russian hackers for their candidate's loss to Donald Trump may have a case . . . 

The Washington Post just reported that the CIA suspects that agents in the Russian government may have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee computer and, for the purpose of getting Vladimir Putin's man Trump in the White House, providing WikiLeaks all those embarrassing e-mails showing a cynical, jaded Democratic establishment trying, ironically, to manipulate the campaign.  I haven't heard anything about voting machines being hacked, but this story of possible manipulation of information designed to implicitly help is a disturbingly new spin on an old story.

Russia also hacked the Republican National Committee computer, according to the CIA, but withheld its embarrassing e-mails so as not to help Hillary.  Julian Assange, meanwhile, says WikiLeaks did not act in concert with the Russians to produce those e-mails.    

Although Trump - now famous for not receiving most intelligence briefings as President-elect - doesn't buy the CIA's charges, two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer of New York and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have called for an investigation into the charges.  McCain has cited past attempts by the Russians to manipulate elections in other Western countries and says that the integrity of our own elections is at stake.  President Obama has launched an investigation as well, which may or may not be completed by January 20.

I only hope that once they do that, someone starts investigation the rigging of the Democratic primaries.    

Some people are already calling for a do-over of the election.  Can we have a do-over of the nominations while we're at it? 

Poland's Mourning

I would be remiss if I did not comment on the latest tragedy of Poland, a nation so fraught with misfortune in its history. The airplane crash that killed Lech Kacyznski, his wife, 87 other high-ranking Polish officials, and seven crew members has shaken the country to its core, with the elite of the Polish ruling class having been wiped out. Yet the Poles have stood steadfast and unbowed in the wake of this tragedy, adn they, like other eastern Europeans shackled by a sorrowful history, seem to be ready to move forward.

Ironically, the crash occurred because President Kacyznski and the others involved were on their way to Russia to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, a mass killing in the Russian city of Smolensk in which Soviet authorities shot Polish army officers and commanders rounded up in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland during the Second World War. Russia and Poland have been in dispute over the nature of the massacre, but the Russians have at least acknowledged that they, not the Germans, were the perpetrators. (Germany hadn't even invaded the Soviet Union yet.) Poles have shown vigilance over the present to not only avoid repetition of past sins against them, but also to press on for a happier future, like their Lithuanian neighbors. Poland is - and will always be - unbroken.

The Terrorists Within

Two developments in domestic terrorism in two separate countries - Russia and the United States - show how unhinged everything is apparently becoming . . ..

In Moscow, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up in the city's subway system in two separate stations, killing 37 people. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a religious militia planning to kill law enforcement officers and incite a rebellion against the government was uncovered and arrested. Although lives were saved in the latter instance, there are many more right-wing extremist groups active in the country to consider.

The Russian "black widow" bombers, as they're called, were women hoping to bring the conflict in the Caucasus region on Russia's southwestern frontier. Guerrillas in the autonomous republic of Chechnya had been fighting for independence from Russia, and a smaller separatist movement also exists in nearby Dagestan. People in these mostly Islamic regions are spurred by anti-Russian nationalism, and they have periodically resorted to bringing their fight to Moscow. The Russian government's attempt to control the local governments directly in these areas has led to a sense of fear and distrust. In the Chechen republic, the installation of a pro-Russian president has led to human rights abuses that have only enraged the insurgents and encouraged jihad more than an outright fight for independence. The violence in the region has only gotten more protracted, and Vladimir Putin's heavy-handed measures to put down the Chechen insurgency have led to anarchy and alliances with organized crime. Kidnappings, violent deaths and suicide attacks have been going on in the Caucasus long before the Moscow bombings, and many believe Putin's strategy has been exposed as unworkable.

Meanwhile, the Hutaree group is the tip of the iceberg in a growing sense of dread among extremist groups who, seeing the economy failing and sensing that the government is against them, are more likely to act out. The Hutaree planned to start a war against the "Antichrist," and even though they were disrupted, this is a negligible upward blip in an otherwise alarmingly growing trend. These people talked about killing policemen and then killing the mourners at their funerals.

Note that they came from Michigan, a state known for private militias and a sense of hopelessness amid the state's continuously deteriorating industrial base. Michigan is nowhere nearly as bad off as the Caucasus region, but the unease over the economy there is still potent - and volatile.

The war against international terror commandos may yet be won, but fight against internal forces - in Russia, in the U.S., anywhere - may be just beginning anew.