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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U.S. eavesdropped on U.N. secretary general, leaks reveal

The leaked documents reveal the United States gathered intelligence on U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, shedding light on his interactions with top U.N. officials and world leaders
The Washington Post
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The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary general’s personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to gather the intercepts.
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Another document reported that following Guterres’ March 8 private meeting with Zelensky and a joint news conference, the secretary general reported to his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, that he was “really pissed off” about a surprise public ceremony in honor of International Women’s Day during the visit.
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Aides later said Zelensky had sprung the event — which included the presentation of medals to uniformed soldiers — on Guterres without warning and later posted photographs and videos of the event that implied the secretary general was congratulating military personnel on one side of the Russia-Ukraine war.
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The document says only that Guterres “emphasized that he made a point of not smiling the entire time.”

Guterres told Dujarric that he went to Ukraine to help, but the Ukrainians “do everything to liquidate us,” according to the apparently intercepted conversation in the report.

Dujarric said Friday in an interview with The Post that Guterres “was indeed unpleasantly surprised that a medal ceremony was added, without consultation, at the end of his very productive meeting in Kyiv with Ukrainian leaders. However, he denies categorically using the term ‘liquidate.’”

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Ukraine’s Longest Day
The first 24 hours of the expected counteroffensive will likely be decisive.

The first 24 hours of Ukraine’s much anticipated counteroffensive may be the longest day for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel said to an aide before the expected Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944: “The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive. … For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day”—a statement immortalized by the blockbuster Hollywood film about the Normandy landings, The Longest Day. Rommel knew that the initial phase of an attack often shapes the character of the subsequent fight, decides victory or defeat, and determines the strategic impact of an offensive.
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Whatever happens on Ukraine’s D-Day, it will not be easy for Ukrainian forces to avoid the war’s character as one of attrition, even if they are large, well-prepared, and well-equipped.
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It will be very difficult for Ukraine to achieve sufficient fire superiority to quickly destroy these layered defenses, and it will be similarly hard to concentrate enough troops to quickly seize Russian positions. (A successful offensive usually requires the attacker to substantially outnumber the defender.) Gaining momentum under heavy Russian fire will be especially difficult given the need to overcome the layered defenses: Clearing a lane of land mines for tanks and other vehicles to traverse, clearing the dragon’s teeth, and breaching the ditches all require specialized equipment and skills. The more likely avenue to success is for the Ukrainians to force the Russians to abandon their defensive positions without much of a fight—perhaps by triggering a panic that their positions got flanked and are now in danger of being cut off and encircled. That might be accomplished by finding a spot in Russian defenses where the layers are weaker, significantly attriting Russian forces with localized and temporary fire superiority, and advancing into the defenders’ rear. This may be the only realistic option for Ukrainians to achieve a quick and deep strategic breakthrough.

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The article is, generally, about nothing... Providing here several extracts from it in order just to show how well-informed those Western "experts" are.
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Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu:

Minister Soylu had a meeting with young people at Topkapı Social Facilities in Fatih, Istanbul. Making a speech here, Soylu said that the West is trying to impose culture and habits like rain and snow on the whole world, and that it is trying to create a uniform human being and that this aim was persuaded by a structure that uses brutal capitalism.

"One of the biggest dangers of the world is cultural terrorism and we are faced with a cultural terrorism. Family structure, morality, big or small, every country's civilization, its history, our religion, We are facing a cultural terrorism aimed at destroying our beliefs, traditions, customs, what our mothers and fathers taught us." — he said.

"We have seen the paint of Europe and America fall off."

'EUROPE IS THE MULE IN AMERICA'S CONVOY'

"There is no such thing as Europe. America exists. Europe is the train in the convoy of the United States. It does not have any special features," Soylu said, adding that European leaders are constantly being discredited, the population is getting older, they will have difficulties in economic production and they will continue to have difficulties.

Soylu said that America continues to lose credibility and the whole world hates America, that Europe is America's pawn in Africa, that all African states hate the states that exploit them and turn to their local languages.

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What's Behind Ukraine's Latest Fight With Europe?
Newsweek

A growing number of Eastern European countries are moving to ban Ukrainian agricultural imports, citing concerns that importing the foreign goods could weaken their own economies. Three nations—Slovakia, Poland and Hungary—have initiated such a ban, and others could soon follow despite international backlash.
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Throughout 2022, Ukraine's gross domestic product (GPD) fell 30 percent.

On Tuesday, Bulgaria and Romania signaled they could become the next countries to ban Ukraine's agricultural imports, threatening to add even more pressure to Ukraine's economy as it seeks to rebound from the economic downturn.

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Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov: everyone is well aware of the ability of the United States to deceive at any moment

CARACAS, April 19 — RIA Novosti. Everyone is well aware that the United States can deceive at any moment, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a press conference following talks with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ivan Gil Pinto.

Since the end of last year, the United States began to ease sanctions pressure on Venezuela by allowing the American company Chevron to extract and refine oil in cooperation with the Venezuelan PdVSA, as well as supply their products to the American market.

“I want to emphasize that everyone knows very well that the United States can cheat at any moment, and much more often they cheat than they keep their own promises, their own proposals,” Lavrov said.

So the minister answered the question of journalists that the United States hinted at the possibility of lifting sanctions from Venezuela, but then threatened with even more pressure if Caracas did not negotiate with the opposition.

"This is their country, this is their hydrocarbons, this is their economy, which is subject to the strongest illegal sanctions. They must decide for themselves how to continue working, how to continue developing their state," Lavrov said about Venezuela.

The Venezuelan opposition at the end of 2022 voted for the liquidation of the "interim government" of Juan Guaido, and he himself left the post of speaker of the opposition parliament. Opposition leaders called the dissolution of the interim government overdue, as the structure has weakened and is not fulfilling its tasks.

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