Navalny located in Siberian penal colony
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was located in a penal colony in Russia's far north, his team said Monday, after a span of nearly three weeks when the imprisoned dissident politician's whereabouts were not known to his aides, lawyers and family.
"His lawyer visited him today. Alexey is doing well," Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Yarmysh added that he is being kept in a prison in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region more than 1,000 miles northeast of Moscow, a region notorious for severe winters and the site of some of the harshest camps of the Soviet gulag system.
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"Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin presumed dead after Russia plane crash"
Oh... Yes... I'm sure it was an accident.
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India and Russia's very different (so far) moon missions
Russia's Luna-25 crashed into the moon last night.
Russia's unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed into the Moon after spinning out of control, officials say.
It was Russia's first Moon mission in almost 50 years.
The craft was due to be the first ever to land on the Moon's south pole, but failed after encountering problems as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.
Meanwhile, India's Chandrayaan-3 completed it's final lunar orbit.
Vikram, which carries a rover in its belly, is due to land near the south pole on 23 August.
The lander detached from the propulsion module, which carried it close to the Moon, on Thursday.
The black-and-white images show close-ups of rocks and craters on the Moon's surface. One of the photographs shows the propulsion module too.
If successful, India will be the fourth country to achieve a moon landing with USA, USSR and China.
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Ukraine has recaptured half of the territory taken by Russia according to Blinken
"It's already taken back about 50% of what was initially seized," Blinken said in an interview to CNN on Sunday.
"These are still relatively early days of the counteroffensive. It is tough," he said, adding: "It will not play out over the next week or two. We're still looking I think at several months."
Hopes that Ukraine could quickly clear Moscow's forces from its territory following the launch of a summer counteroffensive are fading as Kyiv's troops struggle to breach heavily entrenched Russian positions in the country's south and east.
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"Wagner Group halts march on Moscow"
Russia is about to get very interesting. We'll see how it shakes out.
Edit:
I'll add a link to Vox's excellent explainer for what is going on in Russia. Check it out.
The chaotic, fast-moving events at first suggested a potential coup, with Prigozhin threatening a march on Moscow and insisting he aimed to rout out corruption in Russia's leadership. But within 24 hours, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had apparently brokered an agreement between Prigozhin and the government, and Prigozhin announced his plans to send his troops back to Ukraine, while he will live in apparent exile in Belarus.
"They wanted to disband the Wagner military company," Prigozhin said Saturday. "We embarked on a march of justice on June 23. Now, the moment has come when blood could be spilled. Understanding responsibility [for the chance] that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our columns around and going back to field camps as planned."
The Wagner Group is Prigozhin's private army, created initially to further Russia's military goals while still giving the government plausible deniability of actual involvement.
Prigozhin has long been part of Russian President Vladimir Putin's circle, but he is not one of the classical Russian elites. The convict-turned-hot dog seller eventually won lucrative government contracts for catering and construction through his Concord Group business; in 2014, he began building the paramilitary organization known as the Wagner Group. Initially used in Russia's invasion of Crimea that year, the so-called "little green men" began popping up elsewhere, too — in Syria, where Russia supports the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad, and in Mali and the Central African Republic, too.
Wagner has been accused of participating in horrific human rights abuses, most recently in Mali, where the military junta has contracted with the fighting force to try and wrest control from Islamist extremist groups that dominate parts of the country.
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An analysis of the near future of Russia and whether Putin will retain control
(Spoilers: He likely will. But it won't be good for him or the country.)
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Putin's had a bad year
Pulled the below excerpt from the Axios newsletter, but I link to the full article it comes from. This is a good review and reminder that Vladimir Putin has had a really shitty year. (One of the many he deserves.) Unfortunately his misfortune also drags down millions of other people.
With Friday marking one year of the war in Ukraine, the list of assumptions Moscow got wrong is long — and growing, Axios' Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath writes:
- Putin thought Kyiv would fall. But Volodymyr Zelensky remains Ukraine's president and continues to welcome world leaders, including President Biden this week.
- Putin thought Russia would overpower a weak Ukrainian force. But Russian troops weren't ready to fight what turned out to be a strong and resilient Ukrainian force.
- Russia ended up needing reinforcements on the battlefield — which Putin also had failed to anticipate.
- Putin bet that the West wouldn't stick with Ukraine. But the U.S. and Europe's resolve has remained unwavering.
Why it matters: The war has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe — making the world a more unstable place since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022.
- Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are dead. Countless buildings have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of troops have been killed or seriously wounded on each side, AP reports.
- The invasion shattered European security, redrew nations' relations and frayed the tightly woven global economy.
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Germany's final decision to send tanks to Ukraine opens the door
This morning, after Germany's announcement yesterday, President Biden announced the US would also be sending tanks to Ukraine.
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Russia supposedly ready to negotiate
We'll see what truth there is to his claims. Amid Zelenskyy's ten demands for Russia, is that they leave Crimea, which they took in 2014. I have to assume this is a negotiation point designed to be conceded as part of negotiations.
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Zelenskyy has arrived in DC
He addresses Congress tonight at 4:30pm Pacific / 7:30pm Eastern.
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A comment on why the US traded Bout for Griner
A Reddit poster claims this comes from a friend in a counterterror / intelligence think tank. Take that claim with a gain of salt, however I think the point is solid:
Because Bout is burned, the ability for him to do what he did before is essentially nulified because hes spent 15 years in an american prison. we should have gotten more for Bout but the reality is we don't get that luxury. Griner doesn't deserve to die bc Putin wants to poke Biden in the eye, and there's dozens of other Bouts in the world, a few in Russia, a few in America. What Bout did pales in comparison to what our own people in the govt have authorized for arms trafficking. the reality is, authoritarians always have liberal democracies over a barrel with prisoner swaps. it's just the nature of the beast.
but what sets us apart is our willingness to make these hard swaps bc we value life and liberty. It's a greater statement than the inverse condition/outcome wherein someone like Bout is valued higher bc of their danger.
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"Trump presented his Russia hoax theory to a court. It went poorly."
The opening to this article is so good:
One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump's tenure in American politics has been the extent to which he remained cocooned in his own world.
As president, that was often literal: He moved from the White House to his properties to tightly controlled events and to boisterous political rallies, rarely coming across critics or skeptics. It was also true of his presence in the public conversation. He had his Twitter universe and his Fox News conversations and he was content. Outsiders would peek in and report on what he was doing and saying and how it was received, but with a Star-Trek like result: There was no observable impact on the universe being watched.
It was a rhetorical terrarium, self-contained and self-sufficient. An ecosystem where nonsense thrived and spread, where false accusations competed Darwinistically for dominance. So his vague dismissals of the Russia investigation as a hoax in early 2017 had, by 2021, become complicated organisms, vines stretching and intertwining throughout the pro-Trump media universe.
And the finishing, while not as strong as the opening is quite good as well:
The judge made very clear that he understood Trump's suit for what it obviously is.
"At its core, the problem with Plaintiff's Amended Complaint is that Plaintiff is not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm ... instead, he is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum," he wrote.
The appropriate forum is cable news or Truth Social. You can't simply pluck a mushroom off a rotting log and transplant it onto a table and expect it to thrive. It needs the right environment, one in which credulity and fealty are abundant.
The real world is simply too inhospitable.
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The US gets caught with sock puppet social media against China and Russia
Not exactly surprising.
The data analyzed came from 146 Twitter accounts (which tweeted 299,566 times), 39 Facebook profiles, and 26 Instagram accounts, along with 16 Facebook pages and two Facebook groups. Some of the accounts were meant to appear like real people and used AI-generated profile pictures. Meta and Twitter didn’t specifically name any organizations or people behind the campaigns but said their analysis led them to believe they originated in the US and Great Britain.
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"Russia's Brutal Honesty Has Destroyed the West's Appeasers"
It bears reminding that there is a war in Ukraine. The larger press coverage has moved on to some extent, but Russia continues to invade and deny the sanctity of Ukraine's borders. The excerpt below refers to a video a survivor of Mariupol provided them, the video is not in the article but speaks to the blantant acts of Russia during this assault.
I'm forced to wonder, at what point are other countries responsible for allowing this to continue while acts like this take place, ignoring the global laws regarding conflicts? Yes, the threat of nukes is real, but it is something which is solvable.
What makes the video so chilling wasn’t just the fact that targeting civilians is a war crime. It’s that the clip bears the unmistakable logo of RT, the Russian channel that started off in 2005 as a mostly benign attempt to improve Russia’s international image and ended up as a domestic disinformation bullhorn. The video’s unequivocal message: This is what we’re doing in Ukraine, and we’re not even going to pretend anything else.
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"Russia to drop out of International Space Station after 2024"
I can't say that is surprising. It's been a nice surprise that we've had international cooperation on it for so long. MIR2 incoming.
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Panama Papers Whistleblower Grants Interview After Six Years
After six years, two reporters for Germany's Der Spiegel were able to interview the anonymous whistleblower who leaked the Panama Papers. Here are just a few excerpts, though I heavily encourage you to read the full interview.
Notably the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the story of the Panama Papers, was not the whistleblower's first outlet that they reached out to: "I corresponded with many journalists who were uninterested, including at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Wikileaks, for its part, did not even bother answering when I reached out to them later on."
Another notable longer excerpt which delves into why the whistleblower has remained quiet since the leak:
DER SPIEGEL: So, you have remained silent now for six years. Why do you want to speak up now?
Doe: There have been several occasions over the past six years where I have been tempted to speak up. At each one of those points, it has seemed like the world was careening closer and closer toward catastrophe, and so the need to attempt to intervene has always seemed increasingly urgent. At the same time, however, I have had to balance a few factors.
DER SPIEGEL: What exactly are you referring to?
Doe: First, of course, is my own physical safety, and that of my family. And second is the fact that the world is a big place with a cacophony of voices all trying to get their point across. I wanted my words to carry meaning, not to get lost before the next Donald Trump tweet. In 2016, I wrote (Eds: in a manifesto) of my fear based on what I was witnessing, "that severe instability could be just around the corner." I am afraid that instability has finally arrived.
A very good interview both about the realities of being a whistleblower, and also the larger realities of the Panama Papers' importance especially in light of Russia's economic sanctions.
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Chief of Britain’s intelligence service said that Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was likely to “run out of steam” soon
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In Europe's move away from Russian gas, Africa is poised to be the big winner
This article highlights that African countries are using this leverage (rightly so) to demand a better bit of terms from global lenders to enable them to continue to build up their energy infrastructures if they are now going to be providing more to the European market.
As Europe scrambles for energy supplies, observers and Africans themselves are denouncing what they see as energy hypocrisy, considering that most African countries live under regular power shortages and are severely impacted by climate change. African governments have sought to develop new fossil fuel projects to meet local needs, but Western governments have demanded that multilateral lenders such as the World Bank stop funding those projects to reduce global carbon emissions.
“Our countries cannot achieve an energy transition and abandon the polluting patterns of the industrialized countries without a viable, fair, and equitable alternative,” Senegalese President Macky Sall said in a defiant speech at last year’s meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. “Stopping funding for the gas sector … would be a major obstacle.”
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She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed
Essentially the worst case scenario that makes Professors proclaim Wikipedia an unfit source for school.
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Notes on Ukraine
Some interesting insights from someone who went to Ukraine and visited it while this conflict is going on.
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