[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
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[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
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Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 19 February 2020 07:13.
Prior to his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky (in photo with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin) funded several Russian parties, including the Communist Party, most of which were in competition with each other. Voltairenet.org
A Dutch appeals court on Tuesday (18 February) overturned the annulment of a $50 billion award to shareholders in the now defunct Russian oil giant Yukos, a surprise ruling 13 years after the assets came under control of the Kremlin.
Yukos Oil went bankrupt in 2006 after its former chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky fell out with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the government began demanding billions of dollars in back taxes that ultimately resulted in its being expropriated by the state.
Tuesday’s verdict reinstates a decision by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ordering the Russian state to compensate shareholders in the company once headed by fallen oligarch Khodorkovsky. That decision had been overturned in April 2016 by The Hague District Court.
Russia’s Justice Ministry has said it will challenge the appeals court ruling at the Dutch Supreme Court.
“The (lower) court ruled in favour of the Russian Federation, but the court of appeal in The Hague today ruled that the court’s verdict is incorrect. This means that the arbitral award is again in force,” the appeals court said in a statement.
Most of Yukos’ assets were absorbed by the Kremlin’s flagship oil producer Rosneft, and its former owners have for years been trying to recover their possessions.
Legal proceedings seeking damages have been brought by GML, formerly known as Group Menatep Ltd., which held around 70% of shares in Yukos.
Rule of law
Tim Osborne, GML’s chief executive, said the latest ruling was “a victory for the rule of law.”
“The independent courts of a democracy have shown their integrity and served justice. A brutal kleptocracy has been held to account,” he said.
The PCA had ruled in July 2014 that four plaintiffs – not including Khodorkovsky – were entitled to compensation for the loss of their holdings, enabling them to go after Russian state assets.
Russian government assets in France and Belgium including bank accounts have been frozen in a row over compensation for shareholders of defunct oil giant Yukos, officials and a claimant representative said yesterday (18 June).
During the ‘16 campaign, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch hired former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s involvement with Russia. Their new book is Crime in Progress.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. After Donald Trump was elected but before he was inaugurated, BuzzFeed published a leaked document that became known as the Steele dossier - a series of memos written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele suggesting Russia had been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump and that, according to several sources, Russia had compromising information that could be used to blackmail Trump.
This dossier had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a private research company providing research for law firms and corporations as well as opposition research for political candidates. Fusion was first hired to investigate Trump during the primary by the Republican news site The Washington Free Beacon. After Trump won the primary, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee started funding Fusion’s research into Trump.
My guests are the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. They’re former Wall Street Journal reporters. Some of the Russians who surfaced in the Trump investigation were people Simpson and Fritsch had reported on at The Wall Street Journal while investigating Russian corruption and organized crime. Simpson and Fritsch have written a new book called “Crime In Progress” about their investigation into Trump, its impact and Republican attempts to discredit Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.
Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, welcome to FRESH AIR. What were some of the findings in your report and in the Steele dossier that you consider to be the most important early warnings of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia?
PETER FRITSCH: The truth is Chris Steele came into this project about nine months in. We started looking at Donald Trump and his relationship to Russia as part of a much broader project, which was looking at Donald Trump’s business career. As has been reported, we first started working for Republicans. About nine months in, we started working with Chris Steele. Now, we saw a lot in the early going that caused us to have concerns about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.
First, we saw his relationship with Felix Sater. Felix Sater is a Russian emigre to the U.S. who was working with Donald Trump and, importantly, worked with him in the FL-Group, which developed, among other properties, the Trump Soho. You know, this is an individual who was - went to prison for slicing someone’s face open with a margarita glass, who then was convicted of stock fraud - this is all in the ‘90s. So that caught our attention, to see him with a business card - occupying an office in Trump Tower and carrying a business card with Donald Trump’s company name on it.
Then, we found a number of properties inside Trump Tower itself that were occupied by convicted and alleged organized crime figures from Russia. You know, we also just saw a pattern of investments coming into Donald Trump’s properties, and to Donald Trump personally. The other sort of interesting data point in the early going was the transaction in Palm Beach involving a Russian oligarch by the name of Dmitry Rybolovlev - pardon my pronunciation. He is a potash magnate - it’s a fertilizer - sort of king of Russia. He bought Donald Trump’s mansion in the mid-2000s for about $95 million when it was on the market for $45 million. That was a really suspicious transaction to us. So anyway, the sum of that and just the sum of our research regarding his business led us to want to know more about Russia, which is how we started working with Christopher Steele.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 30 September 2019 21:00.
Statue of Bandera in Western Ukraine.
Ukrainian Nationalism and its Demons from the Past
By Sébastien Meuwissen at Visigrad Post
Poland/Ukraine – On January 1st, 2019, several thousands of Ukrainians marched in the streets of Kiev, Lviv and Khmelnytskyï (Western Ukraine) to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera. These past years, there were plenty of similar processions in Ukraine, in particular in the Western part. Thousands of young Ukrainians take part in these nationalists marches, where they wave flags picturing Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Even though they contributed to the creation of an independent Ukraine, the two men have been guilty of many war crimes in their collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Nowadays Bandera and Shukhevych remain controversial historical figures. For some they are national heroes and for others they are criminals.
A territory coveted by its powerful neighbours
In a matter of territorial size, Ukraine is the third biggest country in Europe (behind Russia and France). The name “Ukraine” (in Ukrainian: Україна [ukrɑˈjinɑ]) was used for the first time in reference to the territory of Kievian Rus in the XIIth century. Throughout its history this huge territory was targeted by many invasions and was annexed by some European powers.
During the XVIIth century almost the entire territory of what is now Ukraine fell under the control of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. Later during the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, the Austro-Hungarian (at the West) and Russian (in the Center and at the East) empires shared this Eastern European territory. After the First World War, Poland reappeared on European maps and took most of the Western parts while USSR took the rest of the territory under its control.
The Soviet context and the “Holodomor”
Ukraine suffered tremendously from soviet occupation. The most obvious example of this harsh time is certainly the Soviet caused famine of 1932-1933. The Ukrainian famine named “Holodomor” (in Ukrainian: голодомо́р, extermination by hunger) is seen by many people as a mass murder that can be related to a genocide (even though this event isn’t in a lot of history books).
In a period of just a year and a half, this starvation caused the death of six to eight million people, according to various sources, with two to five millions solely in Ukraine. Even though most of the victims were ethnically Ukrainians, they were not the only ones afflicted by the murderous policy of Stalin (hundreds of thousands of Russians, Tatars and Kazakhs also died).
A coveted multicultural area
During the first half of the XXth century, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions considerably grew in Western Ukraine. According to a population census from 1931 the Ukrainians (mostly Orthodox) constituted the major part of the local population (64%) in the Western region of Volhynia. Other ethnic and religious groups were the Poles (15,6%), the Jews (10%), Germans (2,3%) and other groups less numerous (Czech, Slovaks, Belorussians, …). (1) The already existent tensions between these various groups would considerably grow during the ’30s to evolve into a true hate during the Second World War.
At this time two Ukraines seemed to emerge. On one hand the Western Ukraine that was earlier under Polish and Austrian influence and on the other hand the russified Eastern Ukraine. To the eyes of Ukrainian independentists, Poland and the USSR were hereditary enemies of the Ukrainian nation and should be fought to allow for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. This was precisely this goal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (or OUN), created in 1929.
The strategy of the OUN to reach the creation of an independent Ukraine included violence and terrorism against those who were seen as enemies of an independent Ukraine. Among those cited as the “external” enemies of Ukraine – Poland and USSR – and the “internal” enemies, so to say all people who weren’t ethnically Ukrainian or suspected to collaborate with the enemy. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UPA) was a paramilitary nationalist army engaged in a series of conflicts during the Second World War. It was composed by various fighter groups of the OUN. The OUN and the UPA had for leaders, respectively, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.
Collaboration with Nazi Germany
A few years later, the Second World War began. In 1940, many Western Ukrainians saw Nazi Germany like a partner susceptible to help the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. Hitler was considered a symbol of hope in front of the soviet domination. The act of restoration of the Ukrainian state from the 30th of June, 1941, is very clear on this:
“3. The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.” (2)
On April 28 the division “SS Galizien” was created. It was a military formation mostly made up by Ukrainian volunteers from the region of Galicia (Western Ukraine). Under the initiative of the Wehrmacht, the SS Galizien division slaughtered practically the entirety of the Jewish population of this region.
The massacre of Volhynia
Once the Jewish population were eliminated, the Poles were targeted. It is principally in the Western region of Ukraine that the slaughter of the Polish minority took place. While the Second World War was raging, Ukrainian nationalist leaders commanded their supporters to slaughter the Polish population in the region. Here is a passage of the order given by the OUN on the 2nd of February 1944 to its members:
“Liquidate every inch of Polishness. Destroy the Catholic churches and other Polish cult places (…) Destroy the houses so there is no trace that someone lived there (…) Keep in mind that if something Polish remains, then Poles will come to claim our territories.” (3)
The groups of Ukrainian nationalists went to the towns of Galicia and Volhynia and killed between 40,000 and 60,000 people, mostly women and children. None were spared. On the 11th of July nearly 100 villages were plundered and the population was slaughtered in the most brutal way. Besides murdering the local population, the Banderas tortured with a rare atrocity. Despite the absence of resistance, civilians were killed in their houses, at school, in the churches, or in offices. As practiced later by the Soviet army, rape was largely used as a terror weapon.
The legacy and the demons from the past
The Polish writer Jan Zaleski said: “The Poles living in Volhynia were killed twice. The first time by a weapon and the second time by silence.” With these words he was referring to the way the history of the massacre of Volhynia is often avoided and to the Ukrainian denial of the atrocities that were committed. Besides the numerous crimes committed by the members of the OUN and the UPA, many Ukrainians consider the leaders of these organizations as national heroes. We can see as a proof the various monuments to the glory of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych in the Western part of the country, particularly in the city of Lviv where they are regularly maintained.
The Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babis, has slammed policies promoting mass migration and population replacement which are both propagated by globalist governments in Western Europe.
While touching on the subject which is commonly referred to as ’Replacement Migration‘ during an interview with Die Welt, Babis said, “We do not see migration as a means of counteracting a shrinking population, as in Western Europe.”
Echoing his Visegrád partner Viktor Orbán, Babis also spoke about how he would like to increase the low birthrates of his own country where women, on average, have just 1.7 children.
“We want to get the Czechs to have more children,” Babis said.
After the German reporter asserted that it’s “not very climate-friendly” to set government incentives for people to have more children, Babis responded, saying: “I have four children. Then I’m probably climate-damaging.”
In Germany, a country where a large portion of the population seems to have lost touch with reality, there are now certain climate activists who measure everything in terms of carbon dioxide and would, therefore, prefer to ban child-bearing.
Babis went on to say that the only people who immigrate to the Czech Republic are invited by its government.
“We welcome foreigners, more than five percent of our population is born abroad, but we are the ones who decide who comes here and who does not,” the Czech Prime Ministere declared.
Throughout his tenure as the leader of the small central European country, Babis hasn’t wavered in his opposition to mass migration from the third world – something the EU technocrats are certainly not happy with.
In the past, Babis has suggested that the EU should model its asylum policy after the Australian model, which processes those seeking asylum outside of the country.
Prior to his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky (in photo with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin) funded several Russian parties, including the Communist Party, most of which were in competition with each other. Voltairenet.org
Our Russia dossier wasn’t dodgy. Donald Trump is compromised. Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Photo by STEPHEN VOSS
Statue of Bandera in Western Ukraine.
Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babis