Anti-government rally in the centre of Prague
Idnes: about 30-35 thousand people participate in an anti-government rally in the centre of Prague

An anti-government rally is taking place on Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague, the online publication Idnes reported, citing the information of the organizers.

The material notes that the rally under the motto "Czech Republic Against Poverty" was organized by the newly created party "Right. Respect. Professionalism" (PUP). The demonstration began at 14:00 (15:00 Moscow time), about 30-35 thousand people take part in it, many of whom came from remote regions of the republic.

"The purpose of the action is to draw the attention of the government to the rapid deterioration in the financial situation of ordinary citizens, who have recently been hit by a rise in the price of energy, food, automotive fuel and services," the report says.

Representatives of some parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition parties, as well as experts in the field of economics, law, and foreign policy should speak at the rally. The main speaker should be the leader of the PUP, Jindrich Reich.

During the rally, everyone can sign a petition to the government, in which ministers are urged to develop energetic and effective measures to improve the situation of the population.

After the action, its organizers planned a procession to government buildings and their blockade. Because of this, First Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said the day before that the police are ready to take all measures to maintain public order and protect state institutions if the rally participants violate the laws.

Rakusan also declared the inadmissibility of the actions taken by a group of several dozen people after the end of the previous rally organized by the PUP party on March 11 this year. Then the protesters tried to storm the National Museum adjacent to Wenceslas Square in order to rip the flag of Ukraine from its facade, raised as a symbol of support for Kyiv by the Czech Republic.

During the incident, three police officers were injured. The security forces detained 20 demonstrators, including three because of the image of the letter Z on their clothes. At the same time, one of them also had a patch with the emblem of the "Wagner Group". He was accused of "denying, approving or questioning the genocide" and sentenced to a suspended sentence of six months. Two other protesters are still being investigated under the same article.

This time, the rally organizers asked the participants not to bring either Russian or Ukrainian flags with them.

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Breaking up with Russia is hard for many Western firms, despite war
RIGA, Latvia — Only a small percentage of the hundreds of companies that promised to leave Russia after its invasion of Ukraine have exited, according to several groups keeping a scorecard — and for those that dawdled, departing has only become more expensive and complicated.

The Western companies that stayed are often heavily reliant on Russian business, with the losses of an exit perhaps outweighing possible damage to their brands of staying in the country as it wages a brutal war against Ukraine. Some businesses even grabbed a bigger market share as their competitors departed.

Many others announced they would pause or scale back operations but continue to trade. Others said they would sell their Russian assets but still are seeking buyers or trying to reduce the cost of leaving.

News of the departures last year briefly threatened the Kremlin’s efforts to muffle the impact of the war on Russians. But the continuing presence of so many companies has undermined the Washington-led effort to crush Russia’s economy, contributing taxes that help keep Russia’s war machine running and allowing Russians to maintain their prewar comforts and quality of life, even as Russian missiles destroy Ukrainian lives.

“Russian consumers want to be able to buy the brands that they are used to, Western brands, and the majority do not show any consumer patriotism,” said Ivan Fedyakov, of INFOLine, a market research consultancy. “People know that nothing will replace a BMW or Mercedes or Apple.”

Although the two German carmakers and the American tech giant announced that they would stop or suspend sales and operations, their products and those of other Western luxury brands are widely available, in some cases as a result of gray-market imports.
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“There’s plenty of companies that people think are out because they made an announcement that they would leave Russia,” said Mark Dixon, who runs a London mergers and acquisitions consultancy, the1, and founded the Moral Rating Agency, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on top companies still doing business in Russia. Instead, many companies halted only a part of their business, while others had not fulfilled their promises to leave, he said.
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As we have recently mentioned, if there are profits at stake, companies would do whatever it takes to get their revenues.
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Read the complete version here

PETER HITCHENS: Why are the SAS in Ukraine – and do we have a clue why we're involved in this war?
Daily Mail
Who decided to send the SAS to Ukraine? What are they doing there? What would happen were they to be killed by Russian forces, or captured by them? And what was a British surveillance plane, capable of carrying 30 people, doing over the Black Sea last September, when a bungling Russian pilot almost shot it down, only failing because his missile was a dud? What would have happened if the missile had worked, and many British servicemen and women had died?

Nobody will answer these questions when I ask them. Once upon a time, we had a proper Parliament in which brave, indomitable MPs such as the late Tam Dalyell would pursue such matters. Perhaps, even now, some courageous man or woman is getting ready to step into Tam Dalyell’s shoes. I do hope so.

We can be pretty sure that the leaked documents revealing these facts are accurate, given the ferocious reaction of the US authorities to their publication. By the way, you may be sure that the Kremlin will have known about all this for many months. The cloud of secrecy around such matters is (as so often) there to keep the British and American publics in ignorance, not to keep hostile powers in the dark.

Meanwhile, as far as I know, this country is not at war with Russia. If we did enter such a war, as a NATO member, we would instantly widen the current conflict to cover the whole of Europe. Can you begin to imagine what that would involve? How would the people of this country gain by such events? Is anybody thinking about what we are doing?

First of all, what interest does the United Kingdom have in continuing and sustaining this war? A powerful faction in Washington DC, with supporters in the West Wing of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, have long wanted a proxy war with Russia. They believe passionately that Russia must never be allowed to rise again. This faction, whose founding document is known as The Wolfowitz Doctrine, have been hard at work since 1992, when The New York Times leaked their plans. They are almost exactly the same people who created the Iraq War out of nothing, who got the West into the Afghanistan quagmire, and who backed Islamist fanatics in Syria – who were the sort of people they would have arrested in Chicago.

They have an unparalleled record of fanatical stupidity, and everywhere they intervene ends up in corpse-strewn ruins, with everyone who can get out fleeing from the fire and screams… towards Europe and the Channel coast.

If every dollar these zealots have spent on war had been spent instead on building prosperous free countries in places such as Russia, the world would be a startlingly better place. That, fundamentally, is America’s problem. If nobody in the USA will stand up to them, they will get their repeated stupid wars and the rest of us will have to watch, weep and receive the fleeing multitudes.

But we do not have to take part. Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine? How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it, its cities wrecked, its economy half-dead, untold numbers of its young men gone to graveyards? Why should any British soldiers be there at all? If Parliament does not debate this, then we are not a democracy. And if any critical voices are drowned out with slander and abuse, then we are not a free country.*

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* It looks like old Peter eventually has parted with comfortable illusions about UK being a "free country"...
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💥💥💥
Sudan agreed to host a Russian base, US warned Sudan of consequences, now there's an attempted Coup.

Arestovich suddenly announced that part of the territories of Ukraine would pass to Russia:

"Ethnically monolithic Ukraine will go the same way as Poland. It collapsed. Poland has decreased by 59%, in my opinion. We will not hold our territories. And all our territories will go to the Russian Federation — there are no options here. And it will increase at our expense".

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Why as soon as politicians leave office, their thinking becomes more clear. Arestovich has said some truth!!! 🤯
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The Polish press publishes that from this week it is forbidden to import to Poland from Ukraine:

- grain
- sugar
- dry food
- seeds
- hops
- vegetables and fruits
- products from vegetables and fruits
- wine
- beef
- milk and dairy products
- pork
- eggs
- bird
- alcohol
- honey
In fact, this is the economic strangulation of Ukraine. Such is Polish friendship!
Translated from ProRuBy
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Ukrainian Nazism, or Why a New Nuremberg is Necessary

This is a long-read from Viktor Medvedchuk, an Ukrainian politician who has been prosecuted by the Kiev regime for his political believes and eventually exchanged for Ukrainian POW and brought to Moscow. He is describing in details the history of Ukrainian Nazism and predicts its inevitable future.
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The ideas and methods of Nazism, which has recently spread to the territory of Ukraine, are inherited from the OUN-UPA.

In April 1941, at the II Big Gathering of Ukrainian nationalists, held in Krakow (at that time it was part of Nazi Germany), the "Bandera" branch proclaimed itself "the only true" OUN. Stepan Bandera was declared the new leader of the OUN. The official greeting in the OUN was “raising the straightened right arm to the right obliquely above the head with the words “Glory to Ukraine” - “Glory to the Heroes”, The greeting was copied from the ideologists of Nazi Germany. The colours of the OUN flag were red and black.
...
After the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, many OUN-UPA figures ended up in Western countries, mainly in Canada and the United States, including the ideological inspirers of modern Kyiv Bandera.
...
In May 2006, on the initiative of Yushchenko, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory was created as a central executive body with a special status. With the creation of this institution, the nazification of Ukraine began to be carried out at the state level.
...
Thus, in the period from 2005 to 2014, a revival of Nazi ideology began in Ukraine. From Ukraine, at first quite "softly", they began to create "Anti-Russia" under nationalist and liberal-democratic slogans.

In 2014, Western politicians and intelligence services, with the help of the Ukrainian comprador elite, carried out an unconstitutional state pro-Nazi coup in Ukraine, hiding behind liberal slogans about the European choice of Ukrainians. Legitimately elected, recognized by the entire world community, President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych was removed from power by a group of putschists using Nazi groups with the support of Western diplomats and intelligence agencies.
...
In 2014, the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism finally transformed into a Nazi one and became a state one. The people who seized power also “did not make any serious attempts to hide the fact” that they seized power to fight Russia and Russians, immediately designating Russians living in Ukraine, pro-Russian, left-wing political forces as their enemies. Russians and Russian-speakers living in Ukraine received derogatory "labels".

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Read the complete automatic translation here ⬇️⬇️⬇️

"It's easier to submit commands in the Yakut language, no one understands us, but we understand everything"

There is a very strong side in the diversity of peoples and languages of Russia. Thus, the Armed Forces of Ukraine and representatives of Western intelligence agencies faced difficulties in decrypting radio traffic in the special operation zone, since national units take part in it. We are talking about representatives of battalions formed in Buryatia, Tuva, Dagestan, Yakutia. You can also add the Chechen forces of the Rosguards to this.
What these units have in common is that the fighters talk to each other in national languages.

As found by our subscriber 🙏
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Another advert from Wagner group?

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😡😡😡
Pure Evil.
UN report calls for decriminalization of all sexual activity, including between adults and children
https://www.liveaction.org/news/un-report-calls-sexual-activity-decriminalized/

Sanctions may risk hegemony of US dollar: Yellen

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says US sanctions create a desire on the part of China, Russia, and Iran to find an alternative.

The United States economic sanctions imposed on Russia and other nations have put the dollar's hegemony at risk as targeted countries seek out an alternative, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday.

"There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar," Yellen said on CNN.

During an interview with CNN host Fareed Zakaria, she said that these sanctions definitely "create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an alternative," adding, however, that "the dollar is used as a global currency for reasons that are not easy for other countries to find an alternative with the same properties."

The robust US capital markets and rule of law "are essential in a currency that is going to be used globally for transactions," she added. "And we haven't seen any other country that has the basic... institutional infrastructure that would enable its currency to serve the world like this."

Sanctions are an "extremely important tool," Yellen noted, all the more so when used by the US and its allies as "a coalition of partners acting together to impose these sanctions."

Asked about whether frozen Russian assets can be used to reconstruct war-torn Ukraine, Yellen said that "Russia should pay for the damages that it's caused," but noted that there are "legal constraints on what we can do with frozen Russian assets, and we're discussing with our partners what might lie in the future."

European Commission (EC) lawyers concluded on Thursday that the assets of the Bank of Russia, which had been frozen by the EU, will be returned to Moscow once the war in Ukraine ends, according to the German newspaper Die Welt newspaper.

The newspaper cited an unpublished EC document, which stated that the assets of the Bank of Russia "cannot be touched since once upon a time when the war ends, they will have to be returned to Russia." EC experts have reached that "sobering conclusion" despite having claimed that "there is a political will but legal barriers are high."

Alternatively, the EC has mulled over the idea of investing the currently frozen assets of the Bank of Russia in such a way as to use the interest gained as support for Kiev.

However, it remained that the EC's legal service has yet to find a solution to what would happen in the event that the EU loses the invested funds under any circumstances.

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Arrival of a very powerful bomb (apparently, FAB-1500 with UPCM "Unified Planning and Correction Module") at a military target in Orekhov, Zaporozhye region.
Translated from Kedmi
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Seymour Hersh: Zelensky misappropriated $400 million US earmarked for fuel purchases

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars the US has allocated to buying fuel, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.

On his blog , Hersh writes that Ukraine's government has been using US taxpayer funds to pay dearly for the diesel needed to keep the Ukrainian army moving in the war with Russia.

It is not known how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon of fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, to Afghanistan during the decades of American war.

Zelensky was asked directly about the corruption at a January meeting in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, an intelligence officer with direct knowledge of the meeting told me, was straight out of a 1950s mafia movie.

The generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky's greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president that "he was taking a bigger share of the money that was going to the generals".

Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and other members of the US government. Zelensky responded to American pressure ten days later by publicly firing ten of the most ostensible officials on the list.

“The ten he got rid of were blatantly bragging about how much money they had, driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence officer said.

Meanwhile, Hersh, quoting an intelligence official, said the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the lack of strategic planning regarding Ukraine had caused a growing divide between the White House and the US intelligence community.
...
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Read the complete automatic translation below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the headquarters of the Dnepr and Vostok groups in the Kherson region and the LPR, where he heard reports from commanders Mikhail Teplinsky, Oleg Makarevich and Alexander Lapin.

At a meeting at the headquarters of the Dnepr group, the president presented the servicemen with a list of the icon of the Savior Not Made by Hands. The head of state traveled between the sites by helicopter.

▪️Putin publicly visited the Kherson region, where — publicly, at least — neither the Minister of Defence Shoigu nor the Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov reached.

▪️In the Kremlin press releases, a separate emphasis is placed on the commander of the Airborne Forces Teplinsky and the chief of staff of the Ground Forces Lapin. Both went "on vacation", tantamount to resignation, due to disagreement with the course of the SVO and the decisions made. Both were returned - and most likely, contrary to the wishes of Shoigu and Gerasimov.

▪️Lapin commands the group of troops of the National Guard "Vostok" in the LPR — a structural formation of the Russian Guard. Not only is this confirmation of Lapin's return to the NVO zone, but also his transfer to another grouping with other tasks. Does this mean that Lapin was sent there for reinforcement, or because, in order to avoid conflicts with the leadership of the Moscow Region, it is not clear.

▪️The visit of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief on the eve of the Ukrainian counter-offensive is a step designed to inspire the personnel before the start of full-scale hostilities.

Translated from Rybar
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G7 decided to keep Russian assets frozen until the end of the conflict in Ukraine

KARUIZAWA /Japan/, April 18. /TASS/. Russian state assets held in the G7 countries will remain frozen until the conflict in Ukraine is resolved. This is stated in a joint statement by the G7 foreign ministers, adopted on Tuesday following a meeting in the Japanese resort town of Karuizawa (Nagano Prefecture).

"We are determined, in accordance with the legal systems of our countries, to keep Russia's sovereign assets under our jurisdiction frozen until the conflict related to Russia's violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine is resolved," the document says. The heads of the foreign ministries of the G7 countries also expressed confidence that any resolution of the conflict in Ukraine should also be associated with the payment of compensation by the Russian side "for the damage caused."

The German newspaper Welt, citing an unpublished European Commission document last week, reported that EC lawyers had come to the conclusion that after the end of the conflict in Ukraine, the assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation frozen in the EU should be returned to Russia. At the same time, the EC proposes to invest them in European government bonds, and use the interest to pay Kyiv.

According to Die Welt, since the spring of 2022, the EU has frozen about €300 billion of Russia's gold and foreign exchange resources and another €29 billion of representatives of large Russian businesses. However, the European Commission was unable to confiscate these funds, since such a mechanism is basically absent in international practice, and such a step would further undermine the faith of the rest of the world in the reliability of keeping assets in Western banks.

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