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The newspaper cited an unpublished EC document, which stated that the assets of the Bank of Russia "cannot be touched since once upon a time when the war ends, they will have to be returned to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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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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Blinken, in his comments about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did not consider it necessary to clarify who bombed Japan.

TOKYO, April 18 — RIA Novosti. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unprecedented in terms of destruction and human suffering, but did not name who bombed Japan, nor did he offer any apologies.
“We, the G7 countries, remain committed to maintaining and enhancing disarmament and non-proliferation efforts in order to build a more stable and more secure world. This will also be touched upon at the highest level at the Hiroshima meeting, which, together with Nagasaki, is a powerful reminder of the unprecedented destruction and immense human suffering that the people of Japan experienced as a result of the atomic bombings of 1945," he said.

At the same time, in response to a journalist’s comment that many residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including those affected by the atomic bombings, called for the visit of the heads of the G7 countries, including the United States, as well as the ensuing question whether the United States Secretary of State "something he could have said to them," Blinken never once mentioned who was bombing the Japanese cities, nor did he offer any apologies.
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the US military dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 140,000 people in the first city and 74,000 in the second. The vast majority of victims of the atomic bombing are civilians.

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Eastern Europeans face Brussels backlash over Ukraine grain bans
‘Unilateral bans of individual countries won’t solve anything,’ says Czech farm minister.

European Union politicians and officials have rounded on the front-line Eastern states of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia for imposing import bans on Ukrainian farm produce, denouncing the curbs as illegal and counterproductive.

The three countries banned imports of Ukrainian grain and other food products over recent days, arguing the export surplus had flooded their markets and threatened the livelihoods of local farmers.

The curbs have set the group on a collision course with Brussels while at the same time threatening the EU's fragile solidarity in backing Ukraine's fightback against Russia's war of aggression.

EU diplomats believe the import bans contravene both international and EU law — and will fail to achieve their goals.
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MOSCOW, April 18 — RIA Novosti. Negotiations between Poland and Ukraine on the import of agricultural products have turned into a failure, Polish Minister of Agriculture Robert Telyus said at a meeting with farmers, radio station RMF FM reports.

According to the radio station, the negotiations turned into a fiasco due to the fact that now the parties are not able to develop mechanisms for the transit of goods that would satisfy Polish farmers.
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Last Saturday, Poland and Hungary, amid protests from local farmers, announced the suspension of imports of Ukrainian agricultural products. The European Commission promised to study this decision and called it unacceptable. Subsequently, the Slovak government introduced a ban on the import of a number of products from Ukraine.

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RaHDit hackers uncovered the Russian-language network of CIPSO* Telegram channels

MOSCOW, April 18 — RIA Novosti. The hacker group RaHDit ("Evil Russian hackers") announced that it had uncovered a network of channels associated with the Centres for Information and Psychological Operations (CIPSO) of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Russian segment of Telegram.

"Several Ukrainian SMMs were opened and, through simple analytics, they revealed a network of Ukrainian channels with about five to six million subscribers. The channels are grouped by subject, some of them masquerade as support for the CBO, and some imitate regional Russian large publics," a representative of the group told RIA Novosti.
The hackers published the investigation materials on the NemeZida portal.
The list of channels is divided into four groups — disguised as "support" for a special operation, against mobilization, about captured and dead soldiers, as well as separately — news and thematic channels for disinformation. Among those included in the list there are also large channels with more than 500 thousand subscribers. There is also data on the curator from the SBU and admins.

*The centres of information and psychological operations are part of the Special Operations Forces of Ukraine (until 2014 they were part of the intelligence of the Ukrainian Navy). Their main task is information and psychological sabotage.

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Who's there?

Plumbers...
You have a leak!

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Watch "KONFLIKT (USRR/1983) Garri Bardin" on YouTube 👈

Garri Bardin in 1983
directed experimental stop motion cartoon for adults — Conflict, a Cold War allegory where two groups of matches enter a conflict which leads to a war.

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Vladimir Putin presented the military with an amulet icon during his visit to the Luhansk and Kherson regions.

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For the #US Elite,  #Europe is actually seen as an enemy, due to being the main competitor to the US for high value goods.

#Education systems are generally at least close the US.

Ability to create a productive high-value #workforce is equal/close to the US.

Societal structures are often better than the US:

• #crime rates are lower,
• #health systems generally better especially for poor,
• quality of daily life is equal/superior to the US.

Europe is a threat to the US way of business.

In the post-#WW2 period, maybe for 30/40 years afterward, this wasn't generally true. The US had many advantages, both social and economic from not having been a theater of war.

But they squandered it all in the pursuit of increased corporate profits.

This has been true  for decades now.

And all the things I listed above are about to change, due to the US-financed #proxy war in #Ukraine

Much of the above will also soon apply to #China, particularly the economic and educational comments

video source: @ putingers_cat

MOSCOW, 18 April. /TASS/. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu expressed confidence in strengthening and expanding military cooperation between Russia and the People's Republic of China in the spirit of unbreakable friendship. He stated this on Tuesday during talks with his Chinese counterpart Li Shanfu in Moscow. Read the article 👈

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