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US Militarizing Space, Exiting Treaties in ‘Historical Miscalculation’ to Stay Hegemon

Sputnik – May 21, 2020

The US withdrawing from arms control treaties is, along with its recently admitted push for offensive space capabilities, part and parcel of its quest for war to defend its world position as “king of the hill,” two experts told Thursday.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced the US was leaving the Open Skies Treaty with Russia, and reports emerged hinting the US may back out of the New START Treaty as well. Just days prior, Trump showed his hand in comments hailing space as a future site for offensive military action.

Karl Grossman, a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury and the host of a nationally aired television program focused on environmental, energy and space issues; and Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, joined Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear Thursday to discuss the developments.

‘A Three-Letter Word’

“Tragic, absolutely tragic,” is how Grossman described the news that the US could leave New START, a 2010 treaty between the US and Russia limiting nuclear weapons stockpiles that’s set to expire next year.

“Treaty after treaty is being broken, and the Trump administration is withdrawing the United States from vital, critical, important treaties that have worked. It’s just tragic, and the big question is: where is this going to lead? I think the answer to that is obvious,” Grossman said. “It’s a three-letter word: ‘war.’”

Gagnon noted that “this particular treaty is a major arms control treaty that restricts nuclear weapons on either side. It’s very clear that the United States, during the Obama administration, President [Barack] Obama came forward with a plan to spend a trillion dollars over the next 20 years on a new generation of nuclear weapons. So, the US really doesn’t want to be restricted by any treaties.”

Indeed, the same thing happened when the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in August 2019: just days later, it tested weapons already in development that would have violated the treaty’s limitations on ground-based missile ranges.

“This is not just a Trump thing; this is a bipartisan effort,” Gagnon told host John Kiriakou, recalling that Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, similarly withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001.“This is all about dominance. Treaties, essentially, create a certain stability between the various competing sides so that not one side would have an advantage over the other. But when you’re going for dominance, both on the Earth and in space, then treaties become problematic, and that’s why the US is moving away from all these treaties: it wants to dominate, and it’s willing to, essentially, take us back to the brink of World War III, a nuclear war, in order to gain that dominance,” Gagnon said.

‘Space Weaponization Cat Out of the Bag’

On May 15, US President Donald Trump told Pentagon leaders at the White House, “Space is going to be … the future, both in terms of defense and offense in so many other things.”

The messaging clashes sharply with the way the Trump administration has postured as having created the US Space Force (USSF) as a reaction to the supposed moves by China and Russia to militarize space.

“It was not our choice to make space a warfighting domain,” USSF Vice Commander Lt. Gen. David Thompson told the Mitchell Institute Space Power Forum earlier this month. “Our adversaries have made it very clear that they intend to limit or remove our use of space in crisis and conflict, and just as in every other domain, we will not allow that to happen, we can’t allow that to happen in space.”

Grossman noted similar rhetoric underpinned the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a prospective satellite-based missile interception system the US attempted to build during the 1980s.

By contrast, he said, both China and Russia are deterred from attempting to militarize space, if by nothing else, simply because of “the great expense.”

This, Grossman said, was Trump “letting the space weaponization cat out of the bag and acknowledging that what the US is up to is offensive in nature,” recalling that Trump in the past referred to the Space Force as “taking the high ground.”

“You put it all together, and the US is talking about an offensive, hugely expensive military program in space – and let me just add, Russia and China are not going to allow this. They’re not going to allow the United States to somehow control space and, from the ‘high ground’ of space, control the Earth below,” Gagnon said.

“No, they’re going to meet the US in kind, and that’s why the future, particularly with arms control treaty after treaty being broken by the United States – I hate to say it, it sounds apocalyptic, but I think it’s real, that what we’re heading for would be war and in particular, space war.”

“I think that the aerospace industry really had this whole thing lined up,” Gagnon said. “When Trump came into power, they were very eager to make it happen, and they would have been doing the same if Hillary Clinton had won the election, actually. They would be moving in the same direction.”

‘A Historical Miscalculation’

“For me it all comes back [to] this narrowing, closing window,” Gagnon told Sputnik. “The US has, since World War II, been the ‘big boy on the hill,’ but those days are over as China, Russia, India, Iran, Brazil – you know, other countries are emerging around the world, creating what’s called a ‘multi-polar world,’ meaning more than one power is involved in making decisions, rather than the US at the top of the mound. And so the United States, very sadly, very wrongly, is trying to maintain that control, trying to stay as ‘king of the hill,’ and so they view space, they view the Space Force as a way to do it.”

“So it’s the corporate forces that are really driving this. They’re the ones that see themselves as controllers of the world, corporate money, corporate capitalism, and they’re pushing all of these moves in order to try to essentially take down or make Russia and China and other countries get on their knees again,” Gagnon said.

However, he cautioned, this was a “real miscalculation, a real historical miscalculation on the part of the United States. The sad thing about this is, they’re going to take damn near every dollar that we have in this country to pay for this supposed control-and-domination system of space and the Earth below.”

The irony, Grossman pointed out, is that it was former President Dwight D. Eisenhower who both created the US space industry and warned of the need to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address.

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Militarism | | 5 Comments

Dutch emergency services battle fire at abandoned NUCLEAR PLANT, urge residents to lock windows and doors

RT | May 21, 2020

Dozens of firefighters have been deployed to tackle a blaze at a disused nuclear facility in Dodewaard in the Netherlands. Police have asked the public to stay away and lock all doors and windows to avoid exposure to the fumes.

The fire broke out shortly before noon local time on Thursday in Dodewaard, which is roughly 100 km from Amsterdam. Eyewitness video from the scene shows fire crews battling the blaze on the roof.

The cause of the fire is as yet unknown, but it may have started after work was carried out on the roof recently, according to a spokesperson for the Gelderland-Zuid Safety Region, who added that there may be gas bottles up there. Nearby residents have been told to remain indoors and lock all doors and windows and cut off any ventilation systems.

Police have established a security cordon, while asking cyclists, motorists and other passers-by eager for a look at the incident to leave the area immediately.

The plant has been out of service since 1997 but is not expected to be dismantled until 2045, when radiation at the site drops to safe levels. All fuel rods were removed from the site in 2003, so there is no immediate danger of radioactive fallout.

The main operational areas of the plant were bricked up and contained within a so-called ‘safe zone’, to prevent areas that previously housed radioactive material from being exposed to the outside world.

The power company conglomerate behind the facility is embroiled in a legal battle with the government over who should cover the estimated €80 million cost of decommissioning.

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Facebook consigns PragerU to ‘reduced visibility’ purgatory after challenge to polar bear myth

Currently the video looks like this. © Facebook
RT | May 20, 2020

Conservative channel PragerU has been sidelined on Facebook after a clip challenging climate change dogma ran afoul of fact-checkers. Accused of repeatedly sharing “false news,” they’ve demanded Facebook stop censoring the Right.

PragerU was sentenced to the shadow realm of “reduced distribution” after posting a video to its Facebook page debunking the oft-deployed environmentalist trope that polar bear populations are on the brink of extinction because of the melting ice caps. Informed that third-party fact-checker Climate Feedback had taken issue with the clip, the conservative video-maker was told that if it wanted to return its page to good standing, it would have to appeal to the fact-checker directly.

Insisting that all the facts in the video had been reliably sourced, PragerU pushed back, slamming Facebook for “hiding behind fact-checkers target[ing] ideas they disagree with” and pretending to be “the arbiter of truth.”

“If you truly value freedom of expression, as you often claim, you wouldn’t hide behind fact-checkers targeting ideas they disagree with,” the nonprofit tweeted, demanding Facebook reverse its censorship – or at least own up to it.

The offending video, now hidden under a grayed-out warning screen warning “false information – checked by independent fact-checkers,” uses an iconic photo of a starving polar bear that became a rallying cry for environmental activists in 2017 as a lead-in to debunk the myth of the polar bear as climate victim. Starting with a quote from National Geographic admitting the image was used deceptively – neither the photographer nor the outlet knew why the animal was so skinny – the clip provides statistics from Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford, a thorn in the side of climate change activists for her scholarship that has shown bear populations largely remaining stable – with a few even growing – in spite of warming oceans.

Facebook itself passed the buck when asked by both Breitbart and PragerU about the decision to limit the page’s reach, declaring its third-party fact-checkers were “certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network.”

However, the IFCN, run by the journalism nonprofit the Poynter Institute, is not exactly nonpartisan. The supposedly apolitical organization is heavily funded by liberal bogeymen including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Bill Gates. Poynter has lamented in the past that just half of Americans believe fact-checkers are unbiased.

Earlier this month, Facebook also announced the names of the Oversight Board that would be put in charge of its content policing, raising eyebrows with the inclusion of outspoken partisan activists.

Just days later, its moderators “mistakenly” censored the iconic image of the Red Army soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag on Victory Day as violating “community standards on dangerous individuals and organizations.”It wasn’t exactly an isolated incident – the platform removed a post containing text from the Declaration of Independence in 2018 for “go[ing] against our standards on hate speech.”

The increased censorship of content shared on Facebook has been a direct result of political pressure brought to bear on the Menlo Park behemoth since the 2016 presidential election, in which now-President Donald Trump used social media to bypass mainstream outlets that overwhelmingly supported his opponent. While complaints about censorship on the platform emanate most often from the Right, anti-establishment voices on the Left have also found themselves deplatformed and shadowbanned as well.

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 3 Comments

Canada’s record on Palestinian rights should disqualify it from Security Council race

By Yves Engler · May 21, 2020

Canada’s anti-Palestinian voting record should disqualify it from a seat on the UN Security Council. Hopefully when member states pick amongst Ireland, Norway and Canada for the two Western Europe and Others positions on the Security Council they consider the international body’s responsibility to Palestinians. If they do it will be a rebuke to Canada’s embarrassing history of institutional racism against the Palestinian people.

Compared to Canada, Ireland and Norway have far better records on upholding Palestinian rights at the UN. According to research compiled by Karen Rodman of Just Peace Advocates, since 2000 Canada has voted against 166 General Assembly resolutions critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Ireland and Norway haven’t voted against any of these resolutions. Additionally, Ireland and Norway have voted yes 251 and 249 times respectively on resolutions related to Palestinian rights during this period. Canada has managed 87 yes votes, but only two since 2010.

In maybe the most egregious example of Ottawa being offside with world opinion, Canada sided with the US, Israel and some tiny Pacific island states in opposing a UN resolution supporting Palestinian statehood that was backed by 176 nations in December 2017.

The only time since the end of the colonial period Canada has somewhat aligned with international opinion regarding Palestinian rights was in the 1990s and early 2000s under Jean Chretien. In the early 1990s Norman Finkelstein labeled Canada “probably Israel’s staunchest ally after the United States at the United Nations” while a 1983 Globe and Mail article referred to “Canada’s position as Israel’s No. 2 friend at the UN.” In the early 1980s Ottawa sided with Israel on a spate of UN resolutions despite near unanimity of international opposition. In July 1980 Canada voted with the US and Israel (nine European countries abstained) against a resolution calling on Israel to withdraw completely and unconditionally from all Palestinian and Arab territories occupied since 1967. On December 11, 1982 the Globe and Mail reported that the “United Nations General Assembly called yesterday for the creation of an independent Palestinian state and for Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from territories it occupied in 1967. Israel, Canada, the United States and Costa Rica cast the only negative votes as the assembly passed the appeal by 113 votes to 4, with 23 abstentions.”

Canada’s voting record on Palestinian rights at the UN is an abomination. It’s made worse by the fact that Canada contributed significantly to the international body’s role in dispossessing Palestinians. Canadian officials were important players in the UN negotiations to create a Jewish state on Palestinian land. Lester Pearson promoted the Zionist cause in two different committees dealing with the British Mandate of Palestine. After moving assiduously for a US and Soviet accord on the anti-Palestinian partition plan he was dubbed “Lord Balfour of Canada” by Zionist groups. Canada’s representative on the UN Special Committee on Palestine, Supreme Court justice Ivan C. Rand, is considered the lead architect of the partition plan.

Despite owning less than seven percent of the land and making up a third of the population, the UN partition plan gave the Zionist movement 55% of Palestine. A huge boost to the Zionists’ desire for an ethnically based state, it contributed to the displacement of at least 700,000 Palestinians. Scholar Walid Khalidi complained that UN (partition) Resolution 181 was “a hasty act of granting half of Palestine to an ideological movement that declared openly already in the 1930s its wish to de-Arabise Palestine.” Palestinians statelessness seven decades later remains a stain on the UN.

Over the past year the Canadian government has devoted significant energy and resources to winning a seat on the Security Council. In recent days, Canada’s foreign affairs minister has taken to calling individual UN ambassadors in the hopes of convincing them to vote for Canada.

To combat this pressure, a small group of Palestine solidarity activists have organized an open letter drawing attention to Canada’s anti-Palestinian voting record. Signed by dozens of organizations, the letter will be delivered to all UN ambassadors in the hope that some of them will cast their ballots with an eye to the UN’s responsibility to Palestinians.

Please sign and share this petition against Canada’s Security Council bid: https://www.foreignpolicy.ca/petition

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | 1 Comment

Beijing slaps tariffs on Australian barley; it has had enough of Canberra’s toadying to US on China hostility

By Finian Cunningham | RT | May 20, 2020

The US has counted on Australia’s government and PM as minions in its long-running conflict with China. Now, for Canberra’s dubious services, Australian farmers are reaping a bitter harvest from lost access to China’s vast market.

Beijing announced this week it was slapping 80-percent tariffs on Australian exports of barley. That effectively shuts off China as a market. This followed a ban by Beijing on supplies of Australian beef.

Given that China is the biggest market for Australian agricultural goods, the move is a severe blow, with fears of more curbs on a range of other products, from wine to wool, as well as on the wider sectors of coal and iron ore.

Beijing claims the trade measures are a result of technical issues concerning alleged misuse of subsidies by the Australian government to make its exports more competitive. But that’s doubtless a political cover to mitigate litigation at the World Trade Organization. Realistically, it seems more likely that China has decided to teach Canberra some manners through economic pain.

Despite its reliance on China’s economy, Scott Morrison’s government has shown a spectacular recklessness in enthusiastically adopting the Trump administration’s hostile policy towards Beijing.

At the World Health Assembly conference this week, Australia sided with the US in calling for an inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, with the presumption of China’s guilt over a ‘cover-up’. As it turned out, most nations rejected the US-Australian approach and instead backed an international review of the pandemic carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Australia further incensed Beijing by backing US calls for Taiwan to be admitted to the WHO as an observer, which would undermine China’s unitary claims to the territory.

This was but the most recent expression of Canberra’s kowtowing to Washington’s antagonistic agenda towards China.

The Morrison government has been an ardent cheerleader for the Trump administration in its long-running trade dispute with Beijing. In 2018, Australia banned Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G mobile phone network, reciting Washington’s claims of national security concerns and China’s “malign” interference in internal affairs.

Australia has also backed the US in its stand-off with China over territorial disputes in the South China Sea, echoing Washington’s claims of Beijing’s expansionism and aggression. Last month, Australia sent one of its warships to join US Navy guided-missile destroyers on maneuvers in the contested sea; maneuvers which China views as provocations to its national security.

From Beijing’s viewpoint, Canberra wants to have its cake and to eat it. It relies on China as the top market for its export-led economy, yet at almost every turn has not hesitated to insult Chinese sensibilities by doing Washington’s bidding.

It’s as if the Morrison government seems to resent the fact of Australia’s dependence on China’s economy, while harboring pretensions of superiority by acting wantonly with no regard for Chinese diplomatic respect.

The impression given is that Canberra felt entitled to keep on insulting China with no repercussions.

Now Australian farmers have just lost their most lucrative market, thanks to the Morrison government’s insistence on aggravating Beijing on Washington’s behalf. The impact on the Australian economy could give new meaning to the term ‘Down Under’.

Meanwhile, China can easily find new suppliers of cereal and meat from Russia, Canada, Brazil or the US.

Now there’s a bitter irony, if China were to source farm exports from the US to compensate for the shortfall in Australian supplies. A cruel twist indeed for Aussie farmers, who will foot the bill for Canberra’s toadying to the Trump administration.

Finian Cunningham is an award-winning journalist. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain’s Independent, among others.

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , , | 2 Comments

Iranian Supreme Leader Tweets Country Will Support Any Nation That Fights Israel

Sputnik – 20.05.2020

Iran’s Supreme Leader announced on Wednesday his country would “support and assist any nation or any group anywhere” in its struggles against Israel. His comments follow a Palestinian withdrawal from agreements with Israel over its proposed annexation of the West Bank.

“The Zionist regime has proven it won’t abide by any treaty & understands no logic except force,” Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wrote in a Wednesday statement posted on Twitter as a series of tweets. “The nature of the Zionist regime is incompatible with peace, because the Zionists seek to expand their territories & will certainly not be limited to what they have already occupied.”

“Eliminating the Zionist regime doesn’t mean eliminating Jews. We aren’t against Jews. It means abolishing the imposed regime & Muslim, Christian & Jewish Palestinians choose their own govt & expel thugs like Netanyahu. This is ‘Eliminating Israel’ & it will happen,” the Shiite religious leader explained. “A proposal for a referendum to choose the type of govt for the historical country of #Palestine was registered with the UN as offered by Iran. We say the true Palestinians with Palestinian roots of at least 100 years, and Palestinians living abroad, choose the govt of Palestine.”

“Comprehensive struggles by the Palestinian nation – political, military & cultural – should continue till the usurpers submit to the referendum for the Palestinian nation. This nation should determine what political system should rule there; struggle must continue until then,” Khamenei continued. “We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere who opposes and fights the Zionist regime, and we do not hesitate to say this.”

Khamenei’s comments follow an announcement by the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday that it would cease to abide by any of its agreements with either Israel or the United States – a move itself in response to an announcement by the newly formed Israeli government to begin annexing one-third of the West Bank as soon as July. […]

The area Tel Aviv seeks to annex is part of what is known as “Zone C” under the Second Oslo Accords in 1995, a part of the West Bank subjected to Israel military control. However, the area Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed annexing is roughly 30% of the West Bank and not all of Area C, but mostly the Jordan River valley. As Sputnik has reported, the Israel Defense Forces have used this control to systematically evict Palestinian villages from the fertile land along the River Jordan for decades, later turning the land over to Israeli settlers who now number close to 400,000 in the zone.

Full article

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | 1 Comment

Dr Shelton Reports on Vitamin D, Parts 1 and 2

Dr. John Campbell | May 21, 2020

Thank you very much Matt, for you excellent insights and knowledge.

Somalia and Sweden

https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m…

Elderly Vit D

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c…

https://www.change.org/p/1-in-5-in-th…

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…

Vit D

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…

https://www.gov.scot/publications/vit…

Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults About 42% of the US population is vitamin D deficient. However, this rate rises to 82% in black people and 70% in Hispanics

Vit D in Indonesia

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c…

Vit D

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32252…

Vit D and COVID

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…

Vit D deficiency in Ireland

https://tilda.tcd.ie/publications/rep…

Prevalence and correlates of vitamin D deficiency in US adults

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2…

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/…

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/…

Vit D and COVID

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…

https://www.researchsquare.com/articl…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Russsian Foreign Ministry Press release on YouTube removing accounts of Krym 24 TV Channel, Anna News and News-Front

The Saker | May 20, 2020

We learned on May 20 that the US YouTube video hosting site has removed the accounts of Krym 24 Crimean television channel, as well as two Russian-language news agencies, Anna News and News Front.

Krym 24 is one of Crimea’s most popular sources of information. It is part of Crimea’s largest media holding company, Krym Television and Radio Company, operating through five television channels, three radio stations, a news portal and two websites. The Krym 24 team traditionally covers the most important major news in this Russian region.

Now that the Krym 24 account has been removed from YouTube, about 30,000 subscribers have lost access to videos with tens of millions of viewings. This US-owned platform has taken restrictive measures under the clearly far-fetched pretext of a “hosting rules violation.”

The fact that YouTube failed to provide any convincing evidence to clarify its actions, as well as the fact that the channel’s query remains unanswered, is unacceptable.

As you may be aware, on April 17, US-based Google LLC blocked the Federal News Agency’s account and the associated YouTube account, which resulted in removal of tens of thousands of documentaries and news reports posted by the agency. On an earlier occasion, in January 2019, Facebook moderators deleted, over 500 accounts related to Russia, including Sputnik news agency materials, on a far-fetched pretext.

These are just some examples of US online censorship of Russian news portals.

We consider YouTube’s actions as another act of discrimination against Russian-language media resources from US-controlled online platforms that systematically resort to arbitrary censorship of content in the Russian language.

This policy by US authorities represents a gross violation of US international obligations to ensure free and unfettered access to information, freedom of the media and freedom of expression.

We call on the related international agencies and human rights NGOs to respond to these egregious actions.

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

Ukraine’s ex-leader Poroshenko blames President Zelensky’s office for helping ‘fabricate’ audio of his call with Biden

RT | May 20, 2020

Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that leaked audio of his conversations with Joe Biden was “fabricated” by enemies, hinting that the current president’s office might have played a role.

A series of audio recordings of Poroshenko talking to various officials from the Obama administration emerged this week, including a subservient conversation with then-Vice President Joe Biden. The former president dismissed the recordings as part of a “large-scale special operation” launched by a pro-Russian “fifth column” seeking to destroy Kiev’s relations with its allies in Washington.

“Joe Biden is a friend and ally of Ukraine. We should be grateful to Biden for his role as vice president of the Obama administration,” Poroshenko said in a statement published by his party, European Solidarity.

The audio files were published by Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, who also handed them over to the Prosecutor General’s Office. According to Ukrainian media, the prosecutors then launched an investigation against Poroshenko, who is suspected of high treason and abuse of power.

They show the former president literally taking orders from Washington, including from Biden personally, specifically in the case of the firing of top Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who investigated the Burisma gas company where Biden’s son Hunter was a board member.

Poroshenko did not deny that the voice in the recordings was his, or that he said any of the things that were on tape, but he repeatedly argued that the recordings were “fabricated.” He argued that the administration of the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, might have handed over “raw materials” to investigative journalists who eventually leaked the recordings to Derkach.

He went on to say all this was done to undermine the bipartisan support for Ukraine in the US and weaken Kiev in its standoff with Russia, blaming “pro-Russia provocateurs” for the leak and predictably accusing Moscow of being the ultimate beneficiary of this “scheme.”

Further pointing fingers, the billionaire candy tycoon named oligarch Igor Kolomoysky – his former ally – as one of the “major sponsors” of the alleged “disinformation campaign.”

Kolomoysky is widely seen in Ukraine as the gray eminence behind Zelensky – a former film and TV comedic actor. He once enjoyed Poroshenko’s support and was appointed governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region, going on to spend a fortune on his private militia and ultranationalist volunteer battalions that fought against the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the east.

However, Kolomoysky has since drastically changed his political course, backing Zelensky’s landslide victory over Poroshenko in 2019 and describing an alliance between Kiev and Moscow as the only option for Ukraine.

Poroshenko, meanwhile, vowed to “engage all his contacts, including those in America, both among Republicans and Democrats” to prevent any forces from undermining what he called a “strategic alliance” between Kiev and Washington.

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment