Once more
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/t...-election.html

Look especially at the Trump/white supremacy/Texas independence pictures :D. Reading those hate comments on some sites i am now sure where they come from.

Re Mr Quatro - truth: If there is a theme or event which shows inconvenient truths regarding Russia, the troll farms now generate 30+ spins of this message on the 'net, some may even be true if a bit "shifted", most are lies and even obvious, but the result is a flood of inherent desinformation; people confronted with a hundred 'truths' cannot decide what to believe anymore or just give up research because of being bored. Trump also rides this wave of desinformation, he has a good mentor.

This was 4+ years ago, so they are developing and using different strategies by now. It is not an open war, but war it is.

I must admit that so called "Novichok" is pretty ineffective ((( All its supposed victims have survived (except one misfortunate woman in UK ). If there's a hand of our authorities behind these events than I must also admit that supposed "agents" have lack of qualification. More than this - why the hell they agreed to transfer this clown to Germany ? To deal with all this bsht with "irrefutable proof from unbiased Western authorities" and risking North Stream even more ? Risking to loose support of North Stream from Merkel against US gegemony we've had all these last months? I think they've chosen pretty good moment to get rid of clown... Awful incompetence ((.. I think even if this guy couldn't just pass quietly due to poor health - better was to heal him quietly somwhere in Omsk or Novosibirsk and then to show him healthy to cameras - so there would be less ground for Western media to pour all this rain of sh-t on our heads (Even when he would be declaring - "They've poisoned me!" - he would look even more pathetic ). I mean - we hardly can stop US from trying to end North Stream with all their dirty ways, but why help them ruining this extremely important project ? Awful incompetence ((

Well, petrol is not instantly deadly either, but it serves ok to make people sick enough to quit (see Yushchenko).
Anna Politkovskaya, another outspoken critic of Putin.. she survived the attempt to kill her with poison, but was shot to death in her Moscow apartment building elevator two years later.
Polonium-210 is more suited to kill, if slowly (Litvinenko).
Laughing gas (nitrous oxide) can also be used to kill (Stanislav Bogdanovich und Alexandra Vernigora).

Let's say poison has long been a weapon of the Russian security services.

A list of poisoned Kremlin critics:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...remlin-critics
https://abcnews.go.com/International...ry?id=72579648
https://www.newsweek.com/alexei-nava...istory-1526468
Of course there may be some retaliation now and then, done by others.

So it looks like a human life still does not count much in Russia?

Navalny was already too prominent to just kill him?

Maybe some of this poisoning stuff is more of a warning that any critic, traitor or defector is not safe even abroad? ("We let you go but if you do not keep your mouth shut..")
Also serves as a warning against other possibloe critics, seems the message has been delivered once more here.

Why did they hold back Navalny (they let the plane headed for Germany land in Moscow), before letting him go again?

Maybe the doctors were tasked to make sure that no residue of said poison could be found, and when they thought so they let him go?
(I take it Putin will ask them some questions now ?)

All this desinformation to confuse causes a lot of work.. mabe it is so effective that even Russia does not understand it any more?


So many questions, and so many "variations of answers" :)

Novichok ineffective? thats spin-doctoring in itself. It may be about application and dosis, but chemically Novichok, as a nerve agent, is described in literature as 5-10 times more effective than VX.

And who said that detah always was the penultimate goal of the operation? A crippled, feared victim teaches more lessons to the opponent than a simple fast death. Why else had they let Navalny out then? Germany had no pressure tools against Russia to enforce handing the man over.

And I wonder whetehr Germany really was so well advised to volunteer for that job, considering our intrerest in relations with Russia. The assassination by Russian agents in the Berlin Tiergarten over one year ago already showed the German helplessness. And now they make Navalny their case, too?

That is moral megalomania, and it will lead the germans nowhere. Like with the Tiergarten assassination.

Seems you don't get me well - ok, I'll try to put it in another words - how the situation looks from my sofa:

We are in great need to finish the North Stream successfully - it's the most important project for the whole country as well as Force of Syberia. US and it's satellites in EU is doing it's best not to let us build last kilometers. They've already made the work of previous contractor impossible due to sanctions. With most hardest efforts Gazprom have found solutions to dodge this strike: it took almost a year to find legal solutions, to negotiate with Denmark and Germany, to find new contractor, to find new ships. And now almost everything is ready, US develops new sanctions one after another, but Germany and Merkel personally helps to withstand all that shots from US, but still perspectives for this all-important project are unsteady. And of course it's THE ONLY RIGHT moment to start another roughhouse around insignificant (in our real life, not in Western media) 3-rd rate media clown.
Quite a strange dichotomy: according to Western media our President is evil genius who has lesser resourses but always overplays because he is a) evil and b) because he is smart ( and maybe genius even). And now this evil genius makes absolutely stupid move in a situation when the stakes are very high and balance is very delicate....

Hey, I just read the German govt accused the Russian dictator of using a nerve agent to poison another of his opponents.

I do believe, in Russia, that's known as Thursday...




<O>

Last night I had an insane idea.

Navalny is not the first critic who falls victim to an assassination attempt in Russia. And this deed was committed not in Germany, but on Russian soil. It was Merkel's government then fighting hard for getting Navalny to Germany.

A year ago or so, another intimate enemy of the Russians was assassinated by Russian agents in the Berlin Tiergarten. There was some diplomatic rush and push, and that was it. It was an attack carried out inside Germany, in a park in the German capital.

The reactions to me do not really compare. Why was it so urgent for the Germans to get Navalny to Germany, right while it must have been known to them that this would mean to seat themselves in a most umcomfortable position between "punish the Russians!" and "continue Nord Stream 2!" ?

What if Merkel has done another of her complete and total U-turns she is famous for by now (after all she is mercielssly opporutnsitzic, that is the only principle she consistently has followed in her career) - and decided to use the case of Navalny as an excuse to prepare the shutting down of the Nord Stream 2 project, finally giving in to America's bullying? If so, she would need an excuse, no matter how fabricated, to save her face. It falls into the patterns of rhetoric cheats and tricks that just days ago she voiced her adament determination to see Nord Stream 2 completed - and then bringing Navalny into the formula, so that she could say afterwards: "I was fully determined to get Nord Stream 2 done and not reward Trump - but you see, the circumstances with the Russians changed due to them trying to kill another of their critics, he is being treated in germany and that puts us into a special responsibility, and so it was our moral esponsibility and we had no other choice but to cancel it: Russia forced us. Its a loss for us, but we sacrifice evertyhing to fulfill our moral obligation to punish the Russians." - While in reality, if this narration shows to become true, it may just be about appeasing the Americans.

It really stuns me how sharp the reaction over an assassination attempt in Russia is now, and how imo way too mild the reaction was back on that public murdering in Berlin back then. It just does not calculate smooth. I dont get it.

FOCUS online:


The words Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) chose on Wednesday were unusually harsh. Merkel is rarely clear about what she believes it is about: an “attempted poisoning” of one of Russia's leading oppositionists: “He should be silenced.” Merkel speaks of “serious questions” that Moscow “has to answer”. The Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a chemical nerve agent.

Now the facts are on the table - and the Navalny case is becoming an endurance test for German-Russian relations. Merkel holds out the prospect of a reaction - together with the EU and NATO. What this reaction should look like remains to be seen.

As soon as details about the Navalny case became known, the pipeline debate broke out in Germany. In the opposition in particular, voices are increasing to break off Nord Stream 2 "The apparent attempted murder by the mafia-like structures of the Kremlin can no longer just worry us, it must have real consequences," said Green Party leader Katrin Göring-Eckardt. For FDP leader Christian Lindner it is clear: "A regime that organizes poisonous murders is not a counterpart for large cooperation projects, not even for pipeline projects."

The head of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, said on the Bayern 2 station that the whole spectrum of possible measures must now be on the table. This also included “economic projects”. Nord Stream 2, however, is “a difficult point” - “because if we don't finish this pipeline we would of course shoot ourselves in the knee, so to speak”. Merkel herself had emphasized on Tuesday that she wanted to complete the project.

But the pressure on Merkel is now increasing. It had enforced Nord Stream 2 against the will of numerous European partners - and always defended it against the USA. US President Donald Trump is a thorn in the side of the pipeline. Washington imposed sanctions in late 2019 to prevent completion of the pipeline. In mid-July, the US government threatened further sanctions.

The US argue that Germany and Europe would become energy-dependent on Moscow. Germany would “throw billions” into Putin, criticized Trump recently. Critics accuse the USA of only wanting to export its own liquefied gas at the highest possible prices.

Merkel is therefore in a dilemma. It needs a good relationship with its NATO partner USA, but it is also dependent on Putin when it comes to the future of the Middle East, for example. Without Moscow, little can be achieved here, and his influence on Turkish President Erdogan is also important for Europe.

In addition: Germany is dependent on Russian natural gas. The parallel phasing out of nuclear power and coal will even increase the demand for natural gas. The completed pipeline is to ensure the gas supply to Germany and the European Union (EU) over a distance of 1230 kilometers. The capacity of the line is 55 billion cubic meters per year. That corresponds to the loads of 600 to 700 liquid gas tankers. According to the operating company Nord Stream 2 AG, this gas is necessary to close the EU's increasingly large import gap.

Of course there is also a lot of money involved. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) - who chairs the Supervisory Board at Nord Stream AG - therefore issued an emphatic warning at a hearing in front of the Bundestag Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy in July. According to Schröder, investments of twelve billion euros would have to be written off if the project should still fail.

Both Russian and German companies would then have to bear these losses. Five European groups - Wintershall, Uniper, OMV, Engie and Royal Dutch Shell - each contributed 950 million euros. The rest was financed by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, which is also the 100 percent owner of Nord Stream 2 AG.

An end to the pipeline would also have consequences for the German economy and consumers. According to Schröder, who of course speaks in the interests of the companies involved, without the pipeline there would be additional costs of five billion euros a year for the procurement of gas. And Germany has to do it one way or another: imports make up over 90 percent of German natural gas consumption.

In addition, deliveries from Russia are likely to increase one way or another. This was pointed out by the economist André Wolf from the Hamburg World Economic Institute (HWWI) at the Schröder hearing. Given the dwindling resources in the North Sea, Russia's share of deliveries will increase - even without Nord Stream 2.

In case of doubt, German companies and households will continue to use Russian gas - only that it is more expensive.
Legal consequences could also be added to the economic consequences. The smeared companies should not want to sit on the losses - and make recourse claims against the federal government. This means that it cannot be ruled out that a failure of the project over the last few kilometers would ultimately even affect the German taxpayer.


https://www.focus.de/politik/ausland..._12390875.html

Skybird - interesting point and it comes more interesting together with my previous post - if Merkel really decided to make U-turn - then why Putin plays along with her by allowing transfer of Navalny to Germany ? This swindler has more than once been probationary convicted and has always been allowed to go abroad while in according to Russian law you are banned from leaving the state territory if you have unpaid fines or debts circa 116 Euro ( in today's exchange rates) not to say about criminal record with an active conviction... I cannot understand - what possible "humanitarian" considerations have driven our authorities as out of mind as to let the West produce any "unbiased" media they want without being able to fend off objectively ?

Its not as if Russia is completely desinterested in the pipeline. Having no competitive industrial production economy and depending heavily on the export of ressources, the fall of ressource prices early this year and last winter and that year as well, and the cost pressure this meant for Gazprom puts Putin under certain success pressure as well. Pissing the Germans by refusing to hand over Navalny maybe was a risk in his eyes to threaten relations with the Germans who usually are Russia' closest advocate in the Western world.

The same cost pressure pushes the Americans, their fracking industry as well got seriously hit by the low in ressource prices earlier, and now their frakcing industry is in seriuous financial troubles, thats why they want tzo sele their overpriced gas in Europe, no mamtter what pressure it needs. In the end the whole conflict about the pipeline is a powerplay between Russia and America, and over oney, becasue the strtageic interest of the uS in Europe is quickly declining since years (thats why Trump cares so little to piss Europe all the time). Germany was just so stupid to allow becoming the punching ball in their match - amongst others by eliminating coal and nuclear power simultaneously in Germany and so raising the demand for gas.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...ny-ncna1239143


Pieces like this are helpful to remind me of that my thinking about how Russia ticks maybe is too linear and non-dynamical - ironicaly born from the desire to shed light on it rationally. Maybe my approach is wrong, and should try to see it more "chaotic".

Reading your comments, reading and hearing the news here..lead me to this:

Is Putin in full charge ? Is everyone under him 100 % loyal to him. ?

Markus

^ Its a BIG machine. Can anyone even be in full command and awareness of what is going on any moment?

I assume not even Stalin was fully aware all the time and always in full control - and compared to him Putin still is relatively tame in chosen methods and brutality.

Gents, what are we talking about? What Stalin? What Putin? In any case only working deduction method is "cui prodest". The only side who gains proftit from this situation is US (plus some EU officials). The sides that bear maximum costs are Russia and Germany. Putin isn't insane to shoot our own leg. This is an under-table game of US against North Stream. File closed.

However I cannot fully reject the possibility of some kind of treason inside our officialdom as Skybird sais - but that's again works only in favor of US, not in interests of Russia and our people...