Dec 15 Buonasera Mag
Selected reading and posts from Calenda Cooper Zelensky Strecklow Avdeeva Soldatov & Borogan Tenzer Khara Weiss Linkevicius
Catching up…
EA Worldview’s Ukraine Up-date- hop over to Scott’s amazing hourly Ukraine up-date page. I’ll fill in with some bits and bobs.
Carlo Calenda: 6:00 am alarm in Kyiv.
Stories we’re following…
I’ll be travelling today so I’ve selected some articles that may be of interest. EuroFile will be back to its normal publishing schedule on Saturday in the regular format. Look out for some threads and readings in your inbox in the meantime.
Latest from UK Defence
Ukraine prepares deals to strengthen air defense capabilities. President Zelensky said that Ukraine has made “important progress” this week to strengthen its air defense capabilities. He also urged the European Parliament to launch a tribunal against Russia's “terrorist war.”
Canada said on Wednesday it would revoke a sanctions waiver that allowed turbines for Nord Stream 1, Russia’s biggest gas pipeline to Europe, to be repaired in Montreal and returned to Germany.
UK to train 90 Ukrainian judges for war crime trials against Russian soldiers. The first group of judges started training on Dec. 5. They are attending sessions in a secret location, according to a report by Sky News.
WSJ: China’s leader Xi deepening economic ties with Putin’s Russia despite public distance. China's President Xi Jinping has instructed his government to deepen economic ties with Russia despite his months-long public distance from the Kremlin amid its humiliating battlefield defeats in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 14, citing policy advisers to Beijing.
QatarGate
The European Parliament is reeling amid an inquiry into allegations that World Cup host Qatar paid for influence in Europe. The probe has already nabbed Greek MEP Eva Kaili, who was stripped of her vice president status on Tuesday.
Kaili and three people have been charged with participation in a criminal organisation, money laundering and corruption, Belgium’s public prosecutor announced on Sunday, as part of a major investigation into attempts by a Gulf State, named in the Belgian media as Qatar, to buy influence with large sums of money and gifts.
Qatar denies any involvement.
Police have seized computers, mobile phones and €600,000 (£515,000) in cash at one home, as well as €150,000 in a flat belonging to an MEP and “several hundred thousand euros” from a Brussels hotel room, according to the public prosecutor. The IT accounts of 10 parliamentary staff have been frozen to preserve data for the investigation. The purpose of the search in the European parliament was to seize data, the prosector said.
The anti-corruption NGO Transparency International said the affair appeared to be “a bribery and corruption scandal of epic proportions” that demanded “root and branch reform of the EU institutions’ ethics and integrity systems”.
Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, said the allegations were of “utmost concern” and raised questions about public confidence and trust in EU institutions.
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said: “This is about the credibility of Europe, so this has to trigger consequences in various areas.”
Latest from David Carretta: Panzeri and Giorgi are still in detention. Figà and Talamanca were released on home arrest and wear an electronic bracelet. Kaili asked to postpone her court hearing, which will be held on December 22, 2022.
Staff, Suspected FSB officer charged with smuggling military equipment via Estonia- ERR.ee
Five Russian nationals and two U.S. nationals have been charged with conspiracy and other offenses related to a global procurement and money laundering scheme conducted on behalf of the Russian government. Among them is suspected FSB officer Vadim Konoshchenok, who was arrested in Estonia for allegedly attempting to smuggle military equipment across the border into Russia.
According to a press statement released by the U.S. Department of Justice on December 13, Russian citizens Yevgeniy Grinin, 44, Aleksey Ippolitov, 57, Boris Livshits, 52, Svetlana Skvortsova, 41, and Vadim Konoshchenok, 48, along with US nationals Alexey Brayman, 35, and Vadim Yermolenko, 41 face a range of charges including conspiracy to violate the U.S. Export Control Reform Act (ECRA), smuggling, and failure to comply with the Automated Export System relating to the transportation of electronics.
Sam Cooper, Secret 2020 Privy Council Office memo found ‘active foreign interference network’ in 2019 election- Global News
A February 2020 Privy Council Office national security memo documented China’s alleged “subtle but effective foreign interference networks” that targeted the 2019 federal contest, said MP Michael Cooper.
In the Procedure and House Affairs Committee hearing Tuesday, the Conservative member from Edmonton quoted from a redacted document, saying: “Investigations into activities linked to the Canadian federal election in 2019, reveal an active foreign interference network,” and added that it referenced the Chinese Communist Party.
Stecklow et al, The supply chain that keeps tech flowing to Russia- Reuters
In March this year, a new firm appeared in Turkey’s corporate registry. Azu International Ltd Sti described itself as a wholesale trader of IT products, and a week later began shipping U.S. computer parts to Russia.
Business was brisk, Russian customs records show. The United States and the EU had recently restricted sales of sensitive technology to Russia because of its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and many Western tech companies had suspended all dealings with Moscow.
Co-founded by Gokturk Agvaz, a Turkish businessman, Azu International stepped in to help fill the supply gap. Over the next seven months, the company exported at least $20 million worth of components to Russia, including chips made by U.S. manufacturers, according to Russian customs records.
Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan, Assassins vs. Spies- CEPA
Now that the US and Russia have exchanged Victor Bout, an arms dealer branded the “Merchant of Death” for Brittney Griner, an American basketball player, it might be thought that the human trading game is over.
It isn’t.
The Kremlin has made clear that Paul Whelan, a former US Marine held by the Russians since December 2018, can get home only if the Kremlin extracts another convicted criminal from a Western jail.
The chosen individual next time will be Vadim Krasikov. He is an assassin who murdered a Chechen warlord in Berlin’s Tiergarten park in broad daylight in August 2019, but was so clumsy that he was immediately arrested by German police. In December 2021, Krasikov was sentenced to life in prison. The court found he executed the hit job on direct Kremlin orders — the 50-year-old had traveled to Germany with a fake passport and an alias provided by the Russian state. In jail, he requested books about famous Soviet spies, while denying that he had any connection to Russia’s intelligence agencies.
Paula Erizanu, ‘People can’t afford milk’: Moldovans weigh political future as Ukraine war hits economy- The Guardian
Electricity blackouts, stray missiles and 35% inflation: collateral damage from Russia’s war on Ukraine has plunged neighbouring Moldova into a crisis that goes beyond higher energy bills. “I see elderly people crying in front of the shop window. It’s not that they can’t afford salami; they can’t even afford the basics like milk,” says Carolina Untilă, who works in a corner shop in the suburbs of the capital, Chișinău. Moldova’s dependence on energy imports is driving record inflation. Prices of some products have doubled; in her shop, grocery sales have halved, Untilă says.
Michael Weiss, Why Russia wants to trade a convicted assassin, Vadim Krasikov, in prisoner swaps- Yahoo News
Just before midday on Aug. 23, 2019, Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili headed to a local mosque through the Kleiner Tiergarten, a park in central Berlin, to attend Friday prayers. He never made it. A Georgian national of ethnic Chechen descent, Khangoshvili was fatally shot three times, once in the shoulder, twice in the head.
His assassin was fairly recognizable by the wig he wore and the way he’d sped up to his victim so quickly: on a bicycle. But it was his hasty disposal into the nearby Spree River of his low-rent disguise, the bike, the handgun, and his quick change of outfits, that caught the eye of onlookers, who alerted the police.
Nicolas Tenzer, At the Root of the Russian Regime’s Misunderstanding: the Ignorance of Mass Crimes- Tenzer Strategics
Whoever wants to understand the war that the Russian regime is waging against Ukraine must first consider its first, if one can say indisputable and unforgettable, manifestation: the mass crime. Russia’s war in Ukraine is, quite accurately, a war of extermination in the same way as that of Assad and Russian and Iranian forces in Syria and, to take older examples, of the Hutus against the Tutsis and the Bosnian Serbs against the Bosnian population. Putin’s Russia has been guilty in Ukraine of four categories of crimes, all fully documented: war crimes, crimes against humanity—the character of war crimes when committed systematically—, crimes of genocide—which is what the deportations of Ukrainian children by Russia are, in law, but the other crimes also have a genocidal intent, which is revealed by the very statements of Vladimir Putin and some of the regime’s cronies—and the crime of aggression or crime against peace, which was the permissive factor of all the others.
Bestsellers in Russia…
